Yardie's Aml Ameen and Shantol Jackson on working with Idris Elba

When Idris Elba made his debut as a producer with Beasts Of No Nation, it caused a flurry. He was still on the up as an actor, yet to appear in Star Trek: Beyond or move over to the MCU. Fast forward three years and he’s now the director of Yardie, based on Victor Headley’s novel of the same name, and that flurry has turned into something close to a frenzy, regardless of the speculation about him and a certain secret agent.

Despite all that interest, when it came to publicizing the film, he put two of its leading actors, Aml Ameen and Shantol Jackson, firmly in the spotlight to field a sizeable chunk of the interviews in the run-up to release day. While Jackson is a new face to British audiences, spending most of her career to date on her home island of Jamaica, Ameen is more familiar, thanks to his roles in Kidulthood and The Maze Runner – which was where Elba first spotted him.

“I was going to fly from London to Los Angeles, got in a lift, heard a voice and it was Idris,” he says, recalling how he landed his part in Yardie. “We ended up getting on the same plane, sat together and spoke about a lot of personal stuff really – about his father and my father and them being immigrants. And we talked about Yardie and what the book meant to him – it was one of the first books he picked up that interested him – and what it would mean to me to do something that was close to my culture. Eventually, I asked him ‘Have I got the job?’ and he said ‘Yeah!’ so I read the book and sent him lots of notes on how I’d like the character to shift and change. And we stayed in touch until the film got started.”

Jackson’s experience started off a little more conventionally. “The casting agents in Jamaica told me they’d sent off my resume and pictures for a film, but couldn’t give me many details, except that Idris Elba had something to do with it. I thought at the time that he was the executive producer. Then they told me that the director was coming over and asked if I’d like to meet him, so I said sure.” What Shantol didn’t know at the time was that Elba had more or less made up his mind on casting her in the part. It was only when he arrived in Jamaica and talked with her about the book that the penny dropped. “Then Aml came down and he asked us to do a scene in real time and I thought this was going to be so hard, but Idris recorded it and it was fun.” Two weeks later came the call to tell her the role was hers.

One of the things that impressed them both about Elba as a director was his insistence on authenticity. The film’s early scenes were all shot in Jamaica, including parts of the island associated with gang warfare. He also made sure that the characters hailing from Jamaica spoke in something as close to their natural patois as they could, while making sure it was still intelligible to audiences around the world. For Aml, this meant spending a couple of months on the island, surrounded by local people, so that he could drop his natural British accent and replace it with something closer to Jamaican.

He recalls how that authenticity extended into the development of the characters. “For me, it begins with two things. Firstly, D’s trauma, so I had to put myself as an actor in a place where it would feel honest and real. And that meant Method acting. The second aspect was the love story between D and Yvonne so, after Shantol got the part, we started writing long emails back and forth to each other. They were set in this world that I’d created for D and I was nervous about sending her the emails, but she was completely game and came with her own ideas and thoughts, so we developed a detailed history, from when our characters first met, had their first fight, conceived their child and so on.”

That approach meant they developed a rapport which continued throughout filming. When Shantol first arrived in the UK, he took her around Central London, despite her feeling the cold and, as they lived in the same apartment complex, they spent a lot of time in each other’s company. As well as translating to the screen under Elba’s direction, it’s an experience they clearly both enjoyed and found professionally challenging and fulfilling.