STACK #217 November 2022

MOVIE FEATURE

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Check out more from director Baltasar Kormákur

STACK chats with Idris Elba about taking on a lion’s share of the action in the new thriller, Beast . Words Gill Pringle B east sees Idris Elba BATTLING THE BEAST

big floppy head trying to beat you and you’re pretending it’s a lion,” he laughs. Shot on the pride lands of Limpopo and Northern Cape, Elba arrived directly from filming Three Thousand Years of Longing in Australia, plunging into an extensive rehearsal process. But filming Beast for real was a lot tougher. “It was even more difficult because it was really hot, and we had to wait for certain light. I had a body harness and prosthetics and blood – it was a real job. “The biggest challenges were just figuring out and calibrating the level of fear, because this is a man that doesn’t fight; he can’t fight, let alone fight a lion. “There’s this moment where I punch the lion, and I’m just looking at that and thinking, ‘I’m not sure how this guy’s gonna punch a lion?’ No one punches a lion, you know? And I just had to make that believable.” Elba surely did his homework on lions. “If this is not an action hero guy, then this is also not a beast. This is an animal that has been thrown into this predicament by human beings, which is based on some realities in that part of the world. “It was important that we didn’t villainise the animal. Lions don’t attack human beings often, but in this scenario we figured out what would be the likely case study that would make this lone lion do that. There’s always a danger of laying on a message too thick, but I think we calibrated it so it didn’t feel that way.”

tackling a ferocious rogue lion, but don’t expect him to pull off any superhero moves a la The Suicide Squad . “This character is definitely not an action hero. He doesn’t even hold a gun well,” Elba tells STACK of portraying Nate Samuels, a doctor and divorced dad who must battle the savage lion to protect his two teenaged daughters. “He’s just a guy who’s in a

really terrible situation. And that was appealing to me. It wasn’t a difficult role to get into; I’ve never been chased by a lion so I’d probably be exactly like Nate in real life, if that was the case,” he admits. “It was exciting for me to portray a character that doesn’t have some of the tropes of the action heroes that we all see in films, and he was vulnerable, for sure. He’s vulnerable in a sense of his parenting and relationship with his children, but also this whole scenario that they find themselves in,” says Elba, who bonded so well with screen daughters Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley that the two girls today refer to him as their godfather. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur ( Everest ), Elba’s Nate brings his girls on an emotional trip to South Africa to visit their late mother’s former home. Now overrun by poaching gangs, they have the protection of Nate’s old pal

Leah Jeffries and Idris Elba

and game reserve manager, Martin, portrayed by Sharlto Copley ( District 9 ). Kormákur and Elba had been searching for a project to do together for a long time. Once he signed on, Kormákur went to great lengths to protect his leading man, utilising CGI technology for all the close-up lion scenes. Fighting an imaginary beast was certainly something new for Elba. “I’ve fought in other movies with swords and weapons and against things that aren’t there. But this was a physical being, an animal that was literally ripping me apart, that wasn’t there. So you’re like, how fearful can you be when you’ve got a guy in a grey suit and a

• Beast is out on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov 30

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14 NOVEMBER 2022