Posted by | Cyrena Rose
Golden-Globe winning actor/DJ Idris Elba graces the cover the October 2013 issue of GQ and (as his biggest fan) this is his best cover to date!
I am accustomed to reading articles about Idris (everyday) from DJ’ing gigs to red carpet events. However, in this issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly the oh-so-private star opened-up and revealed parts of his personal life that left my mouth agape.
Elba shares how he was homeless, sold weed to make ends meet and even revealed to the men’s mag how he felt after finding out he was not the father of a boy that he believed to be his own child.
Enjoy the visuals from his shoot (lensed by Sebastian Kim) and an excerpt of the interview (written by Zach Baron) below. Also, check out the behind the scenes video of Idris sharing “How to Transform a Three-Piece into a Triple Threat.”
In 2010, when Elba was doing press for a forgettable movie called The Losers, he began excitedly telling reporters that he’d had a son. In The New York Times, he spoke of the child by name. Soon afterward, though, Elba stopped mentioning him. When Essence asked Elba a year later how his daughter enjoyed being an older sister, he answered point-blank: “I only have a daughter.”
Elba doesn’t like to talk about what happened—has never talked about it, in fact, understandably so—but today, for whatever reason, he does.
The story is this:
He was dating a woman in Florida, had been for a couple of years. They were living together and in love. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy. For a brief moment, it was among the happiest times of Elba’s life. “The celebration of having a son—from a man’s perspective, it’s massive.” He told friends about it. He told reporters about it. Then came the suggestion—not from the child’s mother, but from elsewhere—that not everything was what it appeared to be. “It wasn’t immediately obvious—well, it was, because he didn’t look like me,” Elba says. “But it wasn’t immediately obvious what had gone down.”
Eventually, Elba decided to take a paternity test, which showed the child wasn’t his. “To be given that and then have it taken away so harshly,” he says, “was like taking a full-on punch in the face: POW.”
And then there was the fact that he’d mentioned the kid in public, the knowledge, even then, that at some point he’d be sitting in a room like this one, being asked about the worst, most humiliating thing that ever happened to him. “You know, the truth is—like, even admitting it, I’ll probably get laughed at for the rest of my life. But it is just tragic, and it happened.” He looks directly at me when he says this. “But I wasn’t knocked out. I stood right the fuck back up, and I ain’t aiming to take another punch in the face ever again. Do you understand what I’m saying? It happened to me. I moved on.”
To read the interview in its entirety, click here. Seriously RC fans, it’s eye-opening + check out the video of Idris below transforming a three-piece-suit into a triple threat!
