It's a brave man who portrays a real-life figure who has already been played on screen by Morgan Freeman, but Idris Elba has no shortage of guts. After all, he's also the one aiming to cancel the apocalypse. He’s starring as Nelson Mandela in Long Walk To Freedom and after the Weinstein Company's reveal in Cannes the first poster is now online.
We don’t think any massive Kaiju make an appearance in this one, unless there’s something from his history that Nelson Mandela has really done well to hide. Instead the film, which takes its title from the main man’s 1994 autobiography, charts Mandela's childhood in a rural village, though his activist days and many years spent in prison, right up to his inauguration as democratically elected president of South Africa. So it’s definitely taking a different angle to Freeman and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus. A challenging role, sure, but one we suspect Elba will be well capable of handling - although he did call it "a massive performance piece" for him when we spoke to him recently.
In this one, Naomie Harris – most recently seen in Skyfall – plays Winnie Mandela and Justin Chadwick is in the director’s chair, working from** Les Miserables** writer William Nicholson’s script.
Of course, making a still image work is one thing. It remains to be seen how Elba does when actual footage arrives online, though for an initial reaction report to the trailer we saw in Cannes, click his way. The film itself arrives in the US on November 29, and is still awaiting a UK date.