If you like watching Dev Patel on screen, say a little prayer for the late Bruce Lee.
When Patel was a kid, before he dropped out of school at age 16 to play the scrawny Anwar Kharral on Skins, he snuck downstairs to spy on his dad watching a late night film: Enter the Dragon. He peered wide-eyed and enamoured at Lee’s commanding ‘masculinity’, the first man of Asian descent that made him want to be an actor.
“As a child, you don’t really understand the nuance of the performance or anything, but that was the moment that I wanted to be on TV and kick some [expletive], which I haven’t quite done yet,” he said on Saturday, at the Dubai International Film Festival.
Patel has become known for his self-deprecating humour and humility. Sitting down for our interview, he joked his ‘flamboyant’ polka dot socks — a playful addition to a navy blue suit — were to distract from his lack of intelligence. But he sells himself short. For his breakout role as Jamal Malik in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, Patel won a Critics’ Choice Award and a Screen Actors’ Guild Award, cementing himself as a young actor with promise.
Patel, born in London to Indian parents, who were born in Nairobi, Kenya, is now 25. How does he identify himself?
“I identify myself as still evolving,” he said. “I think it’s very difficult to define yourself at any age. Because if you lose that curiosity in life, you might as well just kill yourself, right? Those great actors like Judy Dench and Maggie Smith, they have that curiosity still. So I don’t know if I’m a product of one place. I’m a product of two different people, my mother and my father, but they’re a product of another [set] of people. I’m a cocktail of different things, I think. A bit of Kenyan, a bit of Indian, a bit of British.”
Though he shunned his ‘cultural heritage’ when he was in school, his role in Slumdog changed things; he now felt a responsibility when portraying characters who looked like him.
“I’m riding the tidal wave of that film, in a way,” he said. For him, it showed that a project with no real movie stars that is set in India could succeed. “The first half of it was subtitled. That broke the mould. I think it ignited an interest in our cultures and in the East.”
His upcoming film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, will hit theatres in April. In it, he’s Srinivasa Ramanujan, a real-life genius from Chennai, India who, during the First World War, made ground-breaking discoveries in the field of pure mathematics.
G. H. Hardy, played by Jeremy Irons, is the Englishman who both challenged and embraced Ramanujan, resulting in a peculiar friendship and a strong professional bond.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year and was showcased at Diff this week. It begins when Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, leaves his hometown and steps into a world that isn’t eager to accept him. He faces violent racist attacks and people who want to discredit his work as soon as they hear his name.
“He was such a staunch Brahman, which means you can’t cross the seas. He couldn’t break caste, he couldn’t eat meat — and those days the vegetables were cooked in lard. There was a rationing. In a way, his religion was his saviour, because that gave him the best wins in his mathematical career from God, but also, it was his downfall, because it stopped him from fully integrating,” Patel said. The caste system in India is one of social stratification, which often decided profession, class and status.
Off screen, Patel is a natural-born charmer. Walking around the festival grounds at Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah, he was more gleeful tourist than big-time movie star. He stopped for every fan, referred to strange men as his ‘brothers’, and smiled toothily at passers-by. When he finally had a minute to sit, he told tabloid! about the England he grew up in, his ‘mathematical bromance’ with Irons and his ideal Bollywood cast.
You’re not jet lagged, are you?
I don’t know what I am. It’s actually not bad, because we came in from Singapore, but it’s been non-stop so far. Luxurious problems, don’t worry about it.
Tough question first. If Ramanujan had gone to England today, in 2015, as opposed to the early 1900s, would he still face the same hurdles?
I think, no. I think it would have been a lot easier for Ramanujan to come [to England] today. He was groundbreaking. He was an icebreaker. He came in in a sea of white men and was the absolute minority. And not only did he look different, but his views on mathematics were radically different. There’s certain mathematicians of that time that were more rigid in their form. This guy was like Jackson Pollock. He came in and was looking at nature and God and creating all these crazy theorems that people wanted proofs for, and he wasn’t about that. He was about the feeling, so that’s difficult. I think I grew up in a very multicultural London, and there were loads of kids that looked like myself from everywhere. From India, from Somalia, from Sri Lanka, from here [in the Middle East]. I’m really lucky. I think people like Ramanujan had to struggle and he opened the doors for people like me.
Are there any other Indian characters, dead or alive, that you’d love to portray?
Nothing comes to mind yet, and I want to hold my cards close to my chest if there is someone.
What’s your dream script or project?
I’ve come across lots of dream scripts and I’m lucky to have been part of one or two of them. I really don’t know until it comes. I’m writing my own things also, and trying to create my own ideal characters and tell stories that people don’t know about. But at the same time, it’s just about working with good filmmakers that are more experienced than I am, which is very easy, because I haven’t been doing this for long.
Have there been a lot of scripts that you’ve turned down?
Yeah, yeah.
What makes you turn down a script, other than, say, conflicting obligations?
I want to make sure that I don’t go stale. If it’s too easy, then I worry about that. Because if it’s easy for me, I know it won’t challenge an audience or inspire them. If you look at Slumgdog or Chappie or [The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel], it’s very flamboyant. And then with Infinity, the idea was to bring a level of nuance and shed that kind of Marigold character, which I do love, and he’s just a comedic creation that is from my brain. I wanted to do something more subtle and subdued, something in real life, and this was a great opportunity to do so.
You spoke about having a ‘mathematical bromance’ with Jeremy in Infinity. One of the things that really stood out was your chemistry on screen. What’s a moment that you remember clearly and vividly with him?
I remember, crystal clear, when I first met him. We were in the studios in London, at Pinewood, and he was smoking a cigarette out of the window with his back to me. I walked in in my t-shirt, and he was really cool. I waited for him to finish, and then he turned around and said, ‘Oh!’ I was like, ‘Uh, Mr. Irons, hello. I’m Dev.’ He’s like, ‘I know who you are.’ We sat down and read the whole script together. I remember his voice. His voice was so enthralling, when he was reading. It was booming. I was like, ‘Whoa, this guy’s cool.’
Did you form a friendship off-screen?
Yeah, I mean, we’re not going to go out clubbing or anything, you know? We’re slightly of different generations. But I think, probably, Jeremy could roll harder than I could. But he was super cool, in between takes and all that. We did have a lot of dinners after. It was great.
You’ve been asked about Bollywood before - who would be your dream Bollywood cast?
If I was ever going to do a Bollywood film, I’d love to be in a film with Shah Rukh Khan, Irrfan Khan, or Nawazuddin Siddique. All the great men. I mean, Amitabh [Bachchan] would be great.
A bit of a personal question. How did you feel when Zayn Malik left One Direction?
[Laughs] I don’t really know much about One Direction, so, I mean, good luck to him, man. What, he wants to do a solo career, right? Yeah. Best of luck to him.
Who do you think are some of the promising people out there in terms of representation, especially in TV and film?
Wow, that’s a… I would say Irrfan is one that’s really representing in a big way. Naseeruddin Shah - I was pretty overwhelmed when I met him yesterday. There’s Frida Pinto, she’s doing a wonderful job. There’s a whole lot of actors that are doing really well.
You said that you dropped out of school at 16 and that you were raised in the industry. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve had to learn?
‘No’. Trying to come back from a ‘no’. That’s really something you learn about; it’s building from the negatives. Unlike other industries where you’re maybe pitching a water bottle or something, it’s more of a personal hit if someone looks at you and is like, ‘I don’t want you for this project.’ Every actor from the greats to the new guys is going to face it. It’s just about being able to persevere.
Finally, what was your favourite film and least favourite film this year?
My favourite film was Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. My least favourite film… I don’t have one, and I would never say.
