Idris Elba was having a 40-degree day when first reading his character Stringer Bell’s death scene on “The Wire.” The acclaimed HBO series spanned five seasons between 2002 and 2008; Elba’s drug kingpin Stringer was killed in the Season 3 finale in 2004 by Omar (the late Michael K. Williams) and Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts).
“I had reservations about how Stringer was dying,” Elba recently said during Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast (in the below video). “There was various ways that [series creator] David Simon wanted to depict that, and I was a little bit against some of that. But the actual beheading of Stringer was an important move, you know? Just to illustrate to the world that, ‘Hey, man, take the blinkers off.’”
The real-life inspiration for Stringer didn’t meet the same fate (thankfully). “The Wire” is famously based off of former crime journalist Simon’s reporting across Baltimore. Simon was familiar with the real Stringer, who did in fact exit the drug world.
“Stringer is a real person who is still alive,” Elba said. “And ‘Stringer’ went on to become a very successful businessman who will remain anonymous forever but successfully built a lot of businesses and, you know, crawled out of the hole. [But] in dramatic terms, on ‘The Wire,’ it wouldn’t have made sense for Stringer to get out. Although in reality, ‘Stringer’ did get out. But that’s not dramatic enough, you know? That’s not the story.”
He added, “Stringer and Colvin [played by Robert Wisdom] are both from different sides trying to reform the drug war, and it’s un-reformable. It belongs to the gangsters and to the career cops who want to get paid, and so Colvin and Stringer needed to have the same arc, thematically, to make the political point. And at a point at which you let a character or charisma or any of that stuff dictate the story you’re telling, you’re kind of becoming a hack.”
Yet Elba himself still has never watched the series, as he shared during “Good Hang.”
Elba previously told THR in 2019 that the planned death scene for Stringer was actually even more spiteful. Late actor Williams’ iconic queer drug slinger Omar “whips his dick out and pisses on” Stringer in the original script by producer George Pelecanos. Elba refused to do the scene. “I was pissed,” he said. “I told [Simon] it was absolute tragedy, that it was sensational, and that it wasn’t going to happen.”
Simon echoed how Elba was “not happy” when he was killed off right “when people were really starting to discover what a leading man he was,” as Simon said to the Associated Press. “And I remember talking with him over the script and saying, ‘Idris, you’re going to have movie roles. You’re going to be an A-lister. People are going to get a load of this death; they’re going to acquire this story arc in retrospect — this is your calling card, man,’” Simon told Elba at the time. “‘You’re going to do fine.’”