After a deep-dive on the influences he pulled from for the film's accompanying soundtrack, which features Skip Marley covering "Johnny Was," Elba again addressed his desire to link up with ASAP Rocky at some point.
"Yeah, ASAP and I, we share a mutual friend, Hector Delgado, who is his engineer and producer," Elba, whose DJ prowess has been more than proven, told Wilkinson. "I love ASAP, he's a good soul. And every time we meet each other we're like, 'Let's work.' Not necessarily music. He wants to act, he does act, I want to do music. So we just collaborate and we nearly made it happen . . . It hasn't happened. Skepta is a good friend also, and they connect. So we're just in a circle where there's a possibility."
Elba added that a collaboration of some sort is "of course" still possible. "There's no 'nos' in this game," he said. "I think what's happening with artists [is] people are reaching out in different genres and going, 'Hey.'"
Helming Yardie, as the 7Wallace Music boss told Complex last month, marks the pinnacle for his work in cinema. "I definitely wanted to be in the big chair growing up, and be a part of the whole process of making the film," he said. "As an actor, you come in and you play a tiny part—an important part—but I wanted to be a co-author as a director and be properly immersed in it."
The movie opens in the U.K. this Friday.