Late one night, factory floor, somewhere in East London. Idris Elba is two decades younger—so not yet The Wire’s Stringer Bell, or Pacific Rim’s Stacker Pentecost, or Nelson Mandela, but still basically the guy he is now: bluntly good-looking, square-shouldered, with a charm so easy it borders on evasive. This is the factory where Elba’s father works. The son has already been a tire fitter, a shop clerk, a DJ, and a drama student, until the money to pay for school ran out. Now, in lieu of a better option, he works here, on the night shift, welding side panels onto a never-ending procession of Ford Fiestas. Often he falls asleep as car after car passes by; to this day in England people drive Fiestas that are missing their bottom welds on account of Idris Elba. He sleeps and wakes up and thinks about his father, doing this same job for thirty years and counting.

This is the night Elba decides he’s had enough. Before he comes to work, he buys a one-way plane ticket to New York. At the plant, he goes by his dad’s office to say good-bye. His dad’s a boss by now, and with that responsibility come certain privileges, which include the keys to a little sports buggy—a go-kart, really, for getting around the factory—keys that Elba, in the midst of an awkward, emotional farewell, swipes from his father’s desk.

He’d brought some beers. It was about 1 a.m. The plant, he remembers, “was huge, about the size of Disneyland.” He took the buggy, started driving it around—joy-riding, basically. “It was freezing out, just driving around that whole plant. I had a Walkman, and I had Sam Cooke on it. That’s all it was: Sam Cooke, the whole album. Sipped from that beer like, ‘Fuck this world.’ ”

He rode around for a couple of hours, returned to his station at 3 a.m. to find an enraged supervisor and, behind that supervisor, his enraged father. He turned the keys in, walked out of the plant.

“And the next day I was in New York for the first time.” He stayed at the YMCA in Union Square, started scouring the local papers for casting notices: “Open audition, black male wanted. 6’4", can play basketball.”

He couldn’t play basketball. The rest of it seemed promising, though.

And just to give you an idea of what Idris Elba’s life is like now, twenty years later:

In a few moments, the evening air here on Ibiza’s south coast will turn burnt orange, and Elba—after threading his way carefully past a Birkenstock-clad Fatboy Slim and a willowy brunette with a pile of loose weed in her palm—will bound onto the outdoor stage at the Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel to DJ for an hour and a half. When his set is over, Elba will be hustled into a waiting car, and we’ll all caravan into the setting island sun toward the unlovely tourist town of Sant Antoni de Portmany. He’s got another gig scheduled there, the second of three this evening. The last DJ set, at Ibiza Rocks House at Pikes Hotel, where Elba’s staying, will take place in a louche warren of rooms where Freddie Mercury used to stay; there’s a little piano, a big comfy bed on which guests are encouraged to dance, and a tub that I am told more than once can hold up to four people. That last gig isn’t even supposed to start until 2 or 3 a.m., and it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Elba already hasn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. He’s come here straight from Los Angeles, where he was attending the premiere of Pacific Rim, the Guillermo del Toro—directed blockbuster in which he stars as a stentorian monster-apocalypse resistance leader. In the UK, the third season of the BBC’s much loved detective series Luther has just begun; Elba plays the title character, in a rumpled suit of self-loathing and rage. And at some point between yesterday and today, the Internet got hold of the first trailer for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, starring Elba as Nelson Mandela, in a performance that does real honor to the flawed, angry, and vivid humanity of the man himself. He’s also got a decent-size role in Thor: The Dark World, out in November. And in a few days he’s flying to Madrid, where he’ll begin shooting The Gunman, with Sean Penn and Javier Bardem.

Right now you look at him backstage, busily preparing to go out and bang house remixes of Lana Del Rey and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and see a man gathering momentum the way public figures sometimes do, when certain stars align. Who knows—maybe it’s merely the sweet, syrupy scent of Red Bull drifting on the wind, or maybe it’s the legendarily nonlethal properties of Ibiza, a place where, I’m told, not a single natural thing can kill you “except drugs.” Maybe it’s all just another set of false indicators in a career filled with them. But here among the island’s silently rotating mechanical bulls and its sunburned Euro girls in white sneakers and tube tops, it feels like an overdue thing is finally happening for Elba, an actor long regarded as one of the most charismatic of his generation, even if until now he didn’t have the work to show for it.