The Beast with Idris Elba: Is the Lion Real or CGI?

Hitting our screens this Wednesday, August 24, Beast takes Idris Elba and the man-eating lion to Africa, where the main character goes with her daughters after the death of their mother. A story of survival, a favorite subject of Icelandic director Balthasar Kormákur (to whom we owe Everest or Survive), the main challenge was not to shoot too many action scenes. But good for his second star.

Because Idris Elba never met a real lion on the set: archival images were indeed used to illustrate certain scenes, and the main animal that the hero faces is the result of digital tricks. Which was not difficult for the actor on the set, because the challenge was both physical and emotional.

“The most difficult thing was to reduce my reaction and emotion after this or that scene”He answers us in the interview given on this topic. “In the beginning, there is someone who is afraid, and so I had to express that feeling. But at the end of the film, he finds strength and courage in him. My expression changes, and in this way I have to express my inner strength. Which I didn’t have before.”

“It’s not easy to react like that when you don’t have someone in front of you. Not fighting with someone who’s standing in front of me was unheard of for me. The more emotionally difficult scene was the one where I got chained. The lion. To make it believable, he had the right amount of anger in him.” I had to be dosed for such a senseless gesture.

It was unheard of for me not to fight with someone who is really in front of me.

However, the actor did not fight in a vacuum. Not always. In order to better visualize the animal’s physical presence and thereby give a visual cue to the game, a stuntman dressed in gray “embodied” Leo during rehearsals. With very precise choreography and headgear the size of animal heads so the team could see very precisely what they could do. The scene was then filmed without him to facilitate the insertion of the digital creature.

Which wasn’t easy, because the goal of Balthasar Kormakur and his teams was to ensure that the lion wasn’t just a special effect: “We worked tirelessly to make this CGI lion truly as alive as the actors he fights.”– the director tells us.

“We did a lot of research on the life of these large mammals to make everything as believable as possible. Also, I didn’t want the lion to attack this family to be a typical villain, but we understood his past and his trauma. We had a fantastic team that allowed us, after months of work, to achieve a result that took your breath away.” And you can judge it right now on the big screen.

Comments collected by Emmanuel Iter from interviews in Los Angeles on August 8, 2022