One of Britain's biggest movie and TV stars is planning to move to Africa to support the continent's growing film industry. Idris Elba, who starred as Stringer Bell in The Wire, tells the BBC that he plans to make the move in the next five to 10 years. "I'm here to bolster the film industry—that is a 10-year process—I won't be able to do that from overseas," he says. "I need to be in-country, on the continent." The 52-year-old, born in London to a mother from Ghana and a father from Sierra Leone, is involved in plans to build a studio on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, but he doesn't intend to live in just one country.
"I'm going to live in Accra, I'm going to live in Freetown, I'm going to live in Zanzibar," Elba says. "I'm going to try and go where they're telling stories—that's really important." In August, Zanzibar's government promised him 200 acres for the studio project, with Shariff Ali Shariff, the island's investment minister, joking that it could be the start of "Zallywood," CNN reports. Elba, who played Nelson Mandela in the biopic Long Walk to Freedom, says the entertainment sector in Africa has as much potential for growth as South Korea's did years ago.
Elba says depictions of Africa in film and TV tend to be negative, but the "median age in Africa is 19; these young people are optimistic and deserve the chance to tell their own stories," CNN reports. "If you watch any film or anything that has got to do with Africa, all you're going to see is trauma, how we were slaves, how we were colonized, how it's just war and when you come to Africa, you will realize that it's not true," he tells the BBC. "So, it's really important that we own those stories of our tradition, of our culture, of our languages, of the differences between one language and another. The world doesn't know that." (More Idris Elba stories.)