Idris Elba on 'Beast' & Creating CGI Lions On Set

As black men, you know, we’re always playing the machismo. You have to be bad and dope. But in this situation, you know, when your two daughters lives are at stake. How bad can you be? Courtney, hi. How are you doing? I’m okay. How are you doing? You know what? Living the dream. So you surprised me with this one. I thought you were going to be the beast. No, he’s far from the beast. He is a little more…of dad. He’s not a fighter or a… He’s not a tough guy at all in this movie. He’s a

guy that’s going to become tough for his children, you know? And, you know, I know that the, you know, the Hollywood version of this film is, you know, a tough guy that can fight and that can, you know, make all the right decisions and look cool. While in reality, nobody’s ever going to do that. You know, if a lion’s chasing you, you don’t look cool. And so and that was a dynamic that, you know, was definitely a choice. I wanted to take audiences on that real examination of fear as Black men, you know, always playing

the machismo.You have to be bad and dope and rowdy. Right? But in this situation, you know, when your two daughters lives are at stake. How bad can you be? You know, you just got to be do what you got

to do to to save their lives, you know? Yes. Yes. So were you fighting at any point, I mean, were you face to face on set with a living, breathing tiger or was the CGI? What was I looking at? Definitely no tigers. It’s a lion. But no, you know, we had no lions on the film, no

real lions. We had a lion that would come visit every now and again just so that we could take pictures of it in a particular light. And that was for special effects to sort of just understand what the light does on its fur when it’s trying to recreate it. But the all the fighting sequences are done with a human being in a sort of like, I don’t know, he just look like a rat to me because he had gray on and everything. But a lot of the fight choreography was done with the human being, and

then a lot of it was done without that. And just me by myself pretending I’m fighting this thing out. How tough was that? I mean to know that the end result was going to look very different than what you were actually executing at the time? It’s a process. It’s a layered process. You know, it’s add this layer, then add this layer, put those layers together and add this layer for me. You know, as I said before, it was about calibrating what looks scary and realistic at the same time, looks, you know, heroic to some degree,

you know, as though it was all a bit of a gumbo. What is the scariest real life animal encounter that you’ve ever had? It could have been a rowdy squirrel. Or you stumbled upon a snake on a hiking trail. I was in Vancouver making a film one time and I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard an almighty racket. I was like, “What is that?” I got up, looked out my window, looked down, and there was this black bear. I had a barbeque during the day and I left, you know, a piece

of chicken on the barbie. I didn’t wash it off before I went to bed. So this thing smell that from wherever it was. And so I ran downstairs inside the kitchen and realized I’d left the kitchen patio open. Right? And this bear was over there happy as Larry. He’s these little pieces of chicken. And I had to creep over to the patio door, slide that bad boy, and he didn’t notice. Oof!. Oh! I think your supposed to yell at a bear. Oh, no, that’s for the movies. No! I would say no yelling. I was like,”Please

don’t look. Please don’t turn around.” I love that. Thank you so much. Idris, as always, a pleasure. Good to see you. Thanks so much. Okay. Bye bye!