IDRIS Elba was held at gunpoint after trying to help a woman during a trip to America.
The Luther actor revealed he stepped in to stop an altercation outside a nightclub but ended up having a gun held to his head.
Recalling the incident, Idris, 50, said: I nearly lost my f***ing life, after attempting to stop a man threatening his girlfriend outside a club.”
He added: “A guy [was] whaling on his missus, screaming in her face, ‘I’ll f***ing kill you,’ and so on.
“I come round and I go, ‘Look how beautiful she is. Why would you talk to this beautiful princess like that?’
“‘He pulled out a gun, stuck it right in my face, and goes, ‘You talking about my girl?’
“He thought I was trying to hit on her.”
When asked how he reacted during an interview on the Smartless podcast, Idris said he chose to back off.
He added: “I remember thinking, ‘Don’t play negotiations like that. Consequences, man.”
Idris is no stranger to confrontation on screen as Detective John Luther in the hit BBC series of the same name and in his new Apple+ TV series Hijack.
The actor, who married model Sabrina Dhowre in 2019, turned Luther into a film this year and said he planned to turn it into a big screen franchise.
Idris said: “We do have the ambition to take it into a franchise because now that you’ve got a film landscape, you’ve got bigger budgets, but also you’ve just got more stories we can tell.
“I want people to be like: ‘Luther, the first film? Wicked.’ And to continue that.
“And then maybe later down the line, when I’m too old, someone else will step in to play John.”
Luther became a cult crime hit when it first aired in 2010.
It went on to have four more runs, with the fifth instalment airing in 2019.