ACTOR Idris Elba ran screaming from a steamy shower romp with his model wife when they were ambushed — by a bat.

The 49-year-old — regularly tipped to be the next James Bond — revealed that he has a phobia of the winged mammals.

And it caused him to flee the shower starkers as he was getting frisky with Sabrina Dhowre.

Idris said the incident came when he was filming new movie Beast in South Africa earlier this year.

He said: “I was shooting in Limpopo. My wife was there and we were going to have some fun in the shower.

“Some morning romance, you know? She got in, then I followed her and closed the door.

“But then I looked down and clinging for life to the inside shower door handle was this bat. A tiny, wet bat. I hate bats. It was freaky as f***. I jumped out of the shower so fast.

“My wife makes fun of me about it to this day — ‘You left me in the shower with a bat!’ ”

Elba — a previous winner of the world’s sexiest man award —- has portrayed drug gang leader Stringer Bell in The Wire and gritty detective John Luther in BBC show Luther.

In Beast, he plays a dad who has to protect his two teenage daughters from a rampaging lion.

But Idris, who married Sabrina in 2019, said he developed the fear of bats — chiroptophobia — in Australia.

He told Men’s Journal magazine: “These big fruit bats would soar by the place I was staying every evening at around five. They were huge and long. Horrifying.”

“Not like the one in the shower. That guy was tiny, but still.”

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