Idris Elba started going to therapy to develop healthier work habits

Idris Elba has already been in two movies this year, plus seven episodes of Apple TV+ series Hijack, plus voicing (and providing the likeness) for a character in Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion. Last year he was in four movies and a couple of shorts and TV episodes. He has over 100 credits on iMDB, going back to the ‘90s, and his output has been at or near this level for at least a decade—maybe two. Elba, in other words, works a lot, and that’s without him being the new James Bond and without including his apparently prolific DJ career.

As a matter of fact, Elba works so much that he started going to therapy to make sure he wasn’t doing it in an unhealthy way. He brought that up on the Changes With Annie Macmanus podcast, saying that he has formed some “unhealthy habits” and that he works in an industry where he’s “rewarded for those unhealthy habits.” And he means that literally, presumably, since he’s a famous actor who can probably get millions of dollars for an acting job, and then he can get millions more for another acting job, so why not take on a bunch of acting jobs?

Elba says that he’s trying to pick up new activities that will help him relax, because the things he does to relax—like chopping up new DJ tracks on his laptop—just end up becoming a different kind of work. He says he could spend 10 days working on a film with “underwater sequences,” holding his breath for “six minutes” at a time, and when he gets home he’ll feel more relaxed working in his DJ studio that he “sitting on the sofa watching TV with the family.” He says that’s the kind of thing he has work on, because it “can’t be all work.”

Hopefully that means we’ll see a bit less of Idris Elba going forward—in a good way, because his family would probably rather get some more time with him than get him in a new straight-to-Netflix action movie.