Elba says he’s not I.P.-obsessed. “I don’t sit and go, I’m going to take this role because it’s franchisable,” he says. On the other hand, he’s also an actor, and to the extent that ego is involved in these choices, he’s self-aware. “I think it’s one of those pinnacle things that actors strive towards, to have that one character where people go, ‘Ah.’ And it branches off into its own universe and fan base. Every actor loves the idea of having their own franchise.” For him, it has been Luther, the BBC detective show about the brash, impulsive, frequently out-of-line detective John Luther, in which Elba gets to flex a familiar muscle but as the lead, grounding the show’s constant moral vicissitudes in a man we disapprove of even as we root him on. The show is now in its fifth season—and will perhaps, someday, be a movie. “I’d love to see three or four Luthers come out as films, definitely,” says Elba.

It doesn’t escape him, by the way, that when there was once talk of an American Luther, every kind of person was considered: every race, gender, and so on. “It was just whether they could pull off the role,” Elba says, a matter of who was good enough to fill his shoes as the troubled, wearisome, satisfyingly deviant John Luther. The project never moved forward.

What is it that we want to see from Idris Elba? If the legacy of his work as Stringer Bell resulted in parallel but distinct mainstream and black-focused strands in his career, it also solidified a reliable character archetype that, if for no other reason than because he’s so good at it, Elba keeps exploring. In other words, the bad guy. Admit it: You like to see Idris Elba break bad.

Or bad-ish, anyway. You can see how we got here: Bell was a “bad guy,” a drug hustler, but you almost couldn’t help but like him as you hated him. Co-star Michael K. Williams, whose Omar Little has cast an equally large shadow over his career, likened Elba to a sparring partner. Whenever he saw Elba’s name on a call sheet, “I went over my notes extra-hard, and I dotted all my i’s and made sure all my t’s were crossed”—a distinction he afforded only a handful of other actors in the show’s stacked cast. He cried in the makeup trailer before filming Elba’s last scene.

Bell was largely based on Lamont “Chin” Farmer, whom co-creator Ed Burns had once, in his time with Baltimore P.D., investigated and helped prosecute. Simon told me that the real Stringer Bell was a man Burns had admired. “The thoughtfulness with which he proceeded in masking his criminal activity,” says Simon. “He was a very shrewd, very thoughtful, very quiet player.” Hence Elba’s characterization. Handsome, reserved, curiously professional: a guy who approached the project corners with MBA-level discipline—which made him all the more insidious, in criminal terms. Elba’s charm had a funny way of exploiting that tension. Simon describes it as existing between “a layer of street arrogance and confidence” on one hand and “something underneath it that’s contradictory” on the other, some broader intellectual and psychological force at work. This was a strong counterpoint to the more dangerous live-wire Avon Barksdale—the role Elba originally auditioned for. (Ultimately it went to the great Wood Harris.)

Admit it: You like to see Idris Elba break bad. Or bad-ish, anyway.

Elba tells me that it all boils down to his upbringing. His depiction of Bell was somewhat based on a guy he knew growing up, a local weed man who went by “The Gent,” whose attitude was amicable, professional, discreet. “The weed man,” says Elba, “in terms of being portrayed, was always like”—he lowers his voice to a grumble—“big and larger-than-life cat daddy.” But Elba is English: understated, stiff upper lip. He preferred to play it differently, beyond the terms of good and bad. He was there to provide a service. “I’m out here selling bricks,” he says. “Not bricks. I’m out here selling fine furniture, not fine furniture. You know?” Even in his newest film, the upcoming Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw—a spin-off of the internationally beloved Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel franchise—Elba plays a bad guy who was, you guessed it, once a good guy. Brixton is his name, though everyone in the movie’s trailers calls him Black Superman because he’s genetically enhanced and apparently unstoppable. For director David Leitch, Elba was a no-contest choice. “I think when you’re looking for someone who can be a formidable adversary for Dwayne Johnson, that’s difficult enough,” says Leitch. “But then you’re looking for someone who can be a formidable adversary for Dwayne Johnson plus Jason Statham. That list gets really short.” The actor is, again, not a franchise nut. Still, he tells me: “I secretly feel like I could make him into a huge character.” He likes playing bad guys. He likes the complexity of those roles, and he’s liking his recent spate of action-movie roles too, which demand a different form of imagination than the usual—and looking beyond the usual, trying new things, keeps him hungry. He doesn’t want to be typecast.