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Sultry actor Idris Elba confirmed the news that all of us were hoping was just a rumor…He’s going to be a dad! Yes, grab the tissue. We’ll get through this together ladies.

During an interview on Oprah’s Next Chapter, the Wire star told Oprah Winfrey, “Yes, my girlfriend is having a baby.  We realized [she was pregnant] around the time my old man was going. It’s the weirdest sort of thing.”

Elba revealed to Winfrey that his father passed away in September and he was a major inspiration for his role as the late and great Nelson Mandela in Mandela: A Long Walk To Freedom.

He said that the movie was a good distraction from focusing on his father’s death and he’s afraid that he’ll “fall apart” if he takes too much time to grieve.

“My dad passed in the last three months. It’s interesting because this film is in honor of my old man. He had lung cancer and he had it for a short period of time and I had been living in LA up to last year, and last year my Dad got sick so I moved back to England so that I could be closer to him,” He said. “We got him in the best health care we could but it had advanced so quickly that we didn’t know it. Africans think cancer is something that does not happen to us. My mother was like, ‘Cancer? no way… African people don’t get cancer!…He was such a tough man. He would expect me to get on a bit. I’m human I guess I should sit back.”

Take a look at a clip of Elba talking about why the role was such a big deal for him below:

Idris Elba Confirms To Oprah He’s Going To Be a Dad, Talks Playing Mandela  was originally published on tlcnaptown.com