Duly influenced, Mr. Elba cultivated many interests growing up: He was a D.J. (and still is, as Big Driis), and he played cricket, hockey, soccer, basketball, rugby and ran a mean 100-meter sprint. He kickboxed and breakdanced. He bought his first car at 14, from his savings working as a tire fitter, and had older girlfriends. I asked what he was like as a kid — it seemed he was obviously an extrovert — but he said he was more an imaginative, silent type who liked to hang back and people watch. That imaginative side helped draw him to acting, which he discovered via drama classes at school before leaving at 16.

A few years after that, he began going hard for television roles, even the ones, sometimes especially the ones, that called for white actors. “It was, ‘Let’s not go for stereotypes,’ ” he said. “There was only a handful of young black actors that had any chutzpah. It was sort of like an open highway for me.”

I asked whether he has ever wrestled with self-doubt or fear, and he said he had made a decision about fear early in his life, as a scrawny preteen. He was on the playground, he said, beanpole thin with an Afro, when one of the bullies stole his ball, then fired it hard at him. The other kids guffawed, and young Idris, mortified yet too frightened to fight, grabbed the bully by the shoulders, and spun him around and around before letting him go, sending him sailing across the playground. “It was a pretty monumental moment for me,” Mr. Elba said. “I wasn’t going to be scared of nothing or nobody.”

If true — does one childhood act really make a man? — that steely resolve helps explain some of Mr. Elba’s appeal: He is the un-self-questioning Alpha male of the moment. Mr. Cross said that nearly half of the fan mail received at “Luther” is from “people who urgently wish to have sex with Idris Elba, across the gender and sexuality divide.” The rest is from people who want to be Luther’s friend, Mr. Cross said, and look after him.

While Mr. Elba said he didn’t relate to Luther’s darkness and depression, he does relate to the way the character bore the world’s weight on his shoulders. Right now, Mr. Elba believes he is at a career pinnacle, something he has felt since “Mandela.” “It was quite the big boy’s role,” he said. “I didn’t consider myself to be in those leagues.”

As such, he feels a responsibility to take advantage of the momentum and keep moving in a dizzying number of directions. Since the start of the year, he’s appeared in a documentary, filmed more of “Luther” (a two-part BBC America special coming this year), begun shooting other features and recorded a new album, all the while raising an infant son, Winston, with his partner, Naiyana Garth. (He has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship.) He’s also broken a British land-speed driving record, and, in the fall, is starting a new clothing line with Superdry.

All of which could suggest that MI6 affiliation notwithstanding, he already is a real life 007 of our time.