By Benji Wilson
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There’s a question that niggles throughout Hijack, Apple TV’s new series about, well, a plane hijack. In the show, Idris Elba plays Sam Nelson, a high-end corporate deal-sealer who by chance finds himself in the middle of a major crisis situation on a flight back from Dubai to London, and winds up playing negotiator with the hijackers.
The worst plane ride of your life: Idris Elba in Hijack.Credit: Apple TV+
Which is all well and good but why, you wonder, doesn’t Idris Elba just go full Idris Elba on their sorry hijacker asses? When will the human colossus from Thor and the Avengers, or the one-man vengeance mission from Luther, or even the gangland kingpin from The Wire, or better still the pro kickboxer from the reality series Idris Elba: Fighter, unleash himself, end the hijack and get back to his loving family, Die Hard-style?
This, it turns out, was all part of the plan.
“I was keen not to play the version that we all expect,” Elba says, speaking in London. “That was a theme for us all throughout. We said, ’Let’s call it Hijack [he does a big Hollywood announcer voice]… and then show people something else. Subvert all the tropes, including the leading character, the great negotiator, being this tough guy.”
Later, he says, we’ll see that Sam can’t really fight, “even though he’s big. He’s not this action hero who just headbutts everyone. He’s not even that good a negotiator. He’s just desperate to get home.”
The set-up for hijack is that Sam is on his way back from a job in Dubai with only a fancy necklace and a ream of apologies as hand-luggage. He’s on his way to try and win back his estranged wife (Christine Adams) although if the charisma and persuasiveness he exhibits on the plane, essentially, his Idris Elba-ness, is anything to go by that shouldn’t be a problem.
“When we meet Sam he’s vulnerable,” says Elba. “He’s not going to be this action hero with big muscles who can just hit everyone because he’s not built that way. He’s just going to try and talk himself in to this, to then try and get himself out of it.”
Hijack plays out in realtime – a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London translates as seven hour-long episodes that are as seat-gripping, holiday cancelling and relentlessly more-ish as you’d expect. Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife) plays a counter-terrorism officer on the ground in London trying to second-guess the hijackers’ next move. Max Beesley (Suits) is the UK police detective tasked with tracking down their enablers and puppetmasters. But basically, Hijack is the worst plane ride of your life made bearable only by the presence of Idris Elba for company, and for Elba that meant a lot of screentime spent in the confines of an aeroplane.
“They built the whole plane,” he says, “360 degrees, a real plane just in a studio, no sides taken off to fit the cameras like normal. So that as an audience you watch it and say, ’I’ve been in that, I’ve seen that seat, that aisle, that kitchen area. The claustrophobia bleeds in to you. It becomes a really interesting balance between a documentary and a drama.”
Meeting Elba in the flesh you quickly realise that six months filming inside a plane fuselage can’t have been easy: today, wearing a dark green linen shorts and shirt combo (with Gucci sliders) it couldn’t be more apparent that there’s a lot of him. He’s six foot two, broad, precisely the kind of guy who would happily pay for extra legroom just to make a flight bearable. (Although, as he points out, his character Sam, ‘luckily enough,’ is seated in the first-class cabin and so gets to stretch out a bit.)
It made the logistics of filming Hijack a challenge.
“There was this one moment where Sam has to get from one place to the other, right, and he’s got to sneak about and he’s got to run down the aisle and then hide. It didn’t work: one of the extras kept saying, ‘Er, I can see you!’ I said, ‘Of course you can, I’m f…ing massive.’ It was a problem. What would you do on a plane if you couldn’t hide? How would you get around – look at the size of me. I ended up having to crawl, creeping past people’s feet and Jim (Field Smith, director and executive producer] having to get under the seats to film otherwise people would be like, ‘Er, look – there’s an elephant running down the aisle.’”
Whatever they did, it works. Hijack wraps a still, taut performance from Elba in a tense, occasionally frenzied thriller; even among some barmy plotting it sustains that tension right across the piece.
Elba plays a one-man vengeance mission in Luther.Credit: John Wilson/Netflix
I ask Elba if he’s ever been in a similarly tense situation requiring some Sam Nelson-style Zen arbitration. I’m expecting him to tell me about cutting some major studio deal or arranging a product promotion, but instead he launches in to a story about nearly getting himself killed.
“I was in a situation one time a bit like Sam where I nearly lost me f—ing life. It was at a party in America actually. It was a guy at the back of this his club wailing on his missus, screaming in her face, ‘I’ll f—ing kill you,’ and so on. I, drunkenly, was taking a piss around the corner and I came round and I go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! Look how beautiful she is. Why would you talk to this beautiful princess like that?’ He pulled out a gun, stuck it right in my face. Goes, ‘You talking about my girl? Are you f—ing talking about my girl?’”
Elba says that his line of reasoning was that paying the man a compliment about his girlfriend would make him see sense and stop screaming at her. He got that one wrong.
“No, he thought I was trying to hit on her. I just remember thinking, ‘Don’t play negotiations like that where you’re doing one thing and trying to make something else happen.’ Consequences, man.”
The presence of Elba in front of me shows that there were no consequences to his clubland near-miss. Luckily. On Hijack, it’s safe to say that the consequences of Sam’s actions, at least for Sam, are similarly positive, as you don’t kill off your major star (and executive producer) if you can possibly help it. But it’s important, Elba says, to keep the audience guessing.
“At times you want Sam to be a bit of a f—ing geezer and then other times you just go, ‘Don’t get yourself shot, man!’” Hijack works because the possibility that either could happen remains a teasing constant throughout.
But given the scenario, and after six months playing a negotiator, the question is would you want Idris Elba sitting on a plane next to you if the worst happened? What would he do.
“I wouldn’t be Sam, that’s for sure. I just wouldn’t have thought it all out that clearly. But if I had an opportunity to speak to a hijacker, and I got eye contact, and I thought for a second that person would listen to me, I would go for that and be like, ‘Dude, this is fairly stupid.’ I don’t think I’d be the hero or try and outsmart the hijackers. But I certainly would want to help the staff and say, ‘Look, if you need a volunteer to help you do something… I’m in 100 per cent.’”
Hijack is on Apple TV+
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