LONDON, June 9 -- The timing was hard to miss. Days after Idris Elba was knighted at Windsor Castle, the 53-year-old actor sat for British GQ and settled, with unusual finality, the question that has trailed him across fifteen years of press junkets, awards-season profiles, and enough fan campaigns to fill a small archive. He was never going to be James Bond. More pointedly, he said: he never could have been.

"Bond is big all over the world," Elba told the magazine. "And [audiences] won't [all] go for a black male, an African male, playing Bond. That's not what they like in their culture. Period."

The interview, published Monday, arrived at a moment of unusual franchise activity. Amazon MGM Studios announced in recent weeks that the sea...