With legions of fans calling for him to be the next James Bond, Idris Elba welcomed a chance to go against type and play a ruthless warlord in "Beasts of No Nation."
"It's a compliment but I always get told, 'Oh, you're handsome. Yeah, sexy Idris,' and I was like, 'This guy's not sexy. I want to play him,'" said the strapping star at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"There's definitely, if you like, a cosmetic approach to this character that I hadn't done before, I think," continued the London native, whose other characters have included a drug lord in HBO's "The Wire," a detective in the British series "Luther" and the title role in "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom."
"(If audiences), let's say my lady fans, will watch this film like, 'Oh my God' — job done, as far as I'm concerned. That's what I tried to do."
In "Beasts of No Nation," available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, Elba plays the savage yet charismatic Commandant. He's the chain-smoking head of a group of mercenary fighters during a civil war in an unnamed West African country.
Abraham Attah stars as the young protagonist, who flees his besieged refugee village only to be captured by Commandant's crew.
Emmy Award winner Cary Fukunaga ("True Detective," season 1) wrote and directed the film, based on the novel by Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala.
It took him 10 years to get the film made. He shot it in Ghana as soon as he wrapped on "True Detective."
Fukunaga unflinchingly delves into the horrors of civil war in some scenes, depicting brutal violence inflicted by child soldiers.
While such scenes might be tough to digest, he says they're nothing compared to the real thing.
"What I know of war, the little I've experienced in the conflict zones I've been to and the research I've done, death is so much more gruesome than anything you've ever seen in a movie or even in documentaries," said the director of 2011's "Jane Eyre" and 2009's "Sin Nombre."
"What I show in the film just barely creates the nausea that you would feel, the smell of death that you'd feel in a real place."
Fukunaga heard some filmgoers at the Venice Film Festival walked out during a screening of his film, and conceded it "maybe pushes, for some people, too far."
"But it's what I needed to show without it feeling, to me at least, false about the experience that these children have to go through, the things these children are witnessing, the desensitization of these kids, even the adults who participate in these kinds of conflicts."
Elba said he studied the behaviour and tactics of some dictators but he didn't base Commandant on anyone in particular.
Rather, he envisioned him like a preacher who rallies up his troops with sermons and chants.
"The Commandant, although he's a military head, is the spiritual head as well, and that was a really interesting revelation for me," said Elba.
"It was like, 'Aha.' It was actually a way in for me as an actor, because I was like, 'I don't want to do a moustache-twiddling ... bad guy.'"
Elba said his father's Sierra Leone heritage, and his family's experience with the civil war there, was another reason he wanted to do the film.
"There was a massive personal attachment to the story in the first place," he said.
"But the second, from a producer's point of view, I really wanted a story like this, films like this, to have the light of day — for people to see that through storytelling, you can, without being bashy on the head, you can give people insight into a very complex world."
This content appears as provided to The Globe by the originating wire service. It has not been edited by Globe staff.