Young King
Dev Patel isn’t exactly a stranger to our screens, but his meteoric rise is still a curious, compelling thing. Hannah Strong takes us back through the young actor’s journey, from the scrappy days of Skins to his regal arrival in The Green Knight.
Like most people who were teenagers in the mid-noughties and spent a lot of time on Tumblr, I used to be obsessed with Skins. Erupting onto the small screen in 2007 (I was 14) Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain’s Channel 4 series offered an edgy, wildly overwrought glimpse into the lives of a group of teenagers in Bristol, about to start their first year of college. Sex, drugs, Cat Stevens covers – Skins had it all, and I was hooked. It’s easy to look back on the show and notice the flaws in its execution, but at the time it really felt like a show that understood adolescence, from the messiness of relationships to mental health and managing parental expectations.
Over the course of six series, Skins helped to launch the careers of several bright young things, including Daniel Kaluuya, Kaya Scodelario and Jack O’Connell, not to mention casting About a Boy star Nicholas Hoult in a whole new light. But of all the talent that came out of the fictional Roundview College, none have shone quite so bright as Dev Patel, who played sex-obsessed Muslim teenager Anwar Kharral. Today, Patel is a certified A-Lister, and his latest turn as Sir Gawain in David Lowery’s sublime Arthurian fantasy The Green Knight only further confirms he’s one of Britain’s best acting talents. But it all began with Skins, after his mother took him to an open casting call in 2006. Unlike many of his cast mates, Patel had no professional acting experience.
Although Anwar is one of the least fleshed-out characters in his generation of Skins, Patel’s charisma and comedic timing was clear from the start, bringing much-needed warmth to a character often solely utilised for comic relief while his contemporaries dealt with more poignant plotlines. Along with best friend Maxxie, Anwar is also the only character who never gets a solo episode in his cohort, affording him less screen time and character development – though Patel gamely tackles the hurdles Anwar does face, which largely revolve around reconciling his Muslim faith with his desire to drink, do drugs and party with his friends. The series occasionally touches on the discrimination Anwar faces as a British Pakistani, even from his friends, and on a school trip he is detained by Russian authorities while entering the country. But while these fleeting references gestured towards representation sorely lacking on screen in 2007, they were never truly given time to be unpacked in the same way Skins dealt with some of its other hard-hitting topics, such as eating disorders and losing a parent.
Of course Patel was destined for greater things, and it was Skins that brought him to the attention of filmmaker Danny Boyle (via his daughter Caitlin, a fan of the show) who was casting the lead role in his adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A – the film that would become Slumdog Millionaire, and launch Dev Patel in Hollywood. It was Patel’s unassuming, everyman quality that appealed to Boyle, who had auditioned numerous actors in India but couldn’t find one who fitted the character of Jamal Malik, born in Mumbai’s Juhu slum who goes on to win the jackpot on Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Hindi-language version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. “A lot of the young guys trying to get into Bollywood, they’re all in the gym six hours a day,” Boyle explained in 2009. “I thought, ‘That’s not right, I don’t want some muscle man as the lead.”
Patel rose to the challenge, achieving a character arc never afforded to him by his time on Skins. His performance channels youthful optimism and immaturity, and achieves that ordinary hero quality that Danny Boyle was looking for, giving Patel his first chance to really share his natural charm that would win over the world. Slumdog Millionaire would go on to take home Best Picture (and seven other awards) at the 2009 Oscars, and remains Fox Searchlight’s highest-grossing film of all time. Even so, the film’s success did not guarantee instant stardom for Patel, who didn’t receive many nominations for his performance (though the film did win the Screen Actors’ Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture). While a lead role in a Best Picture-winning film might secure some high profile roles for a white actor, Patel struggled to gain traction, instead taking several supporting roles (the less said about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, the better).
Patel is a perpetual delight as the enthusiastic resort manager Sonny Kapoor in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, acting alongside the creme de la creme of British thespians: Judi Dench, Bill Mighy, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and Celia Imrie. “He’s an amalgam of loads of weird uncles of mine, and a bit of Fawlty Towers thrown in,” Patel explained of his character to Peter Travers in 2016. Drawing on his physical comedy skills first demonstrated in Skins, Sonny bounces around the Marigold, larger than life – his lankiness works to his advantage, giving him a Keatonesque aptitude for appearing amusing without saying a word. Patel’s exuberance is effortlessly charming, particularly paired with the gentle perplexment of the guests at Sonny’s hotel. The film’s success was such that it received a sequel in 2015, which Patel reprised his role for, and while the trip wasn’t quite as novel the second time around, he remains a bright spot in its execution. In the interim, he starred as tech wunderkind Neal Sampat in Aaron Sorkin’s television drama The Newsroom, and two independent films (About Cherry and The Road Within) which received less-than-positive reviews.
In the early part of the last decade, there was a definite sense that Hollywood just didn’t really know what to do with Dev Patel, failing to cast him in roles that allowed him to really demonstrate his acting skills, despite there being strong evidence for both. Patel himself has spoken of the difficulties of getting typecast, and having to “wait for an Indian role to come by, where I could put on a thick accent.” It was Garth Davis' 2016 biopic Lion that finally reminded the world that Patel should be a superstar, as he took on the role of Saroo Brierley, a man accidentally separated from his biological family at five years old who sets out to find them two decades later.
Patel plays Saroo at 25, when he begins his search for his biological family, and perfectly captures his sense of isolation and frustration. It’s a role without the high action or comedy of his previous characters, and without these flourishes, the film rests on the powerful performances given by Patel and his young co-star Sunny Pawar. Even Salman Rushdie – a vocal critic of Slumdog Millionaire – was a fan, stating: “I would like it to win in every category it's nominated for and in most of the categories it isn't nominated for as well.” While Lion didn’t win big on Oscar night, Patel did secure his first nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, losing out to Mahershala Ali for Moonlight (if you’ve got to lose to anyone, that’s a pretty worthy contender.)
After Lion, an appearance in Anthony Maras’ thriller about the 2008 Mumbai hotel bombings followed. Hotel Mumbai is a harrowing watch, and contributes to the continued problematic trend of real-life tragedy being used for entertainment purposes – plus it’s another role in which Patel had to put on an Indian accent. “Sometimes I feel stuck in this cultural no-man’s land. I’m not British enough to be fully British, not Indian enough to be fully Indian” he told The Guardian in 2021. The same year he appeared in Hotel Mumbai, Patel played the leading role in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest, a thriller about a British man hired to kidnap a bride to save her from an arranged marriage. It’s a more action-heavy role for Patel, and although the script is lacking, his performance – all moody grit and gun-toting – certainly is not.
But it’s his turn as the eponymous young writer in Armando Iannucci’s passion project The Personal History of David Copperfield that really solidifies Patel’s effortless effervescence; charming beyond measure, it’s a sparky adaptation of Dickens featuring an all-star cast, and Patel more than holds his own opposite the likes of Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton. Patel’s comedic talent pairs perfectly with Ianucci’s update on the classic story of a writer in progress, and the film’s warmth is palpable – it’s a comforting hug of a film, and Patel, at its heart, never missteps. He breathes new life into the character, and flits from wide-eyed wonderment to steely determination with ease. Plenty of actors have taken on the role of David Copperfield over the years, but none have imbued him with such natural likability, nor captured Dickens’ creative spark. Perhaps Patel’s own scrappy nature has a little to do with it.
Having worked with so many talented filmmakers previously, the pairing of Patel and David Lowery for The Green Knight was an exciting prospect – Lowery having never made a bad film and Patel one of the most compelling young actors working today. Together they created something different from the rest of their filmographies; a bewitching, odd tale of honour and honesty within the magical realm of King Arthur’s court. As Sir Gawain, Patel retains the charisma which won him fans around the world, but also offers a roguish side, as Gawain deliberates between desire and duty. He’s regal in his chainmail and a stunning yellow cape, enduring the physical and mental trials Gawain undergoes but never losing the softness that makes him a compelling knight. We’re used to seeing gleaming machismo when it comes to Arthurian legends; Patel offers something more refined and thoughtful, while fully embracing Lowery’s wild, often weird vision of the mythical kingdom. It’s the perfect marriage of director and actor, entrancing up until the very last frame.
The next time we see Patel on our screens, it will be in the film he’s also directed, produced and co-written, described as “John Wick in Mumbai”. Netflix will be releasing Monkey Man in 2022, and it seems certain to only add further fuel to the growing campaign for Patel to take over from Daniel Craig as James Bond. While there’s no doubt he would usher in a new era for the franchise both in terms of more diverse representation and his own unique acting talent (Patel feels like a much less self-serious choice, more versed in comedy than previous 007s but equally able to look threatening with a gun in his hand) it could be a shame for him to get tied to a franchise for a decade or so when he’s been doing consistently good work (across both studio and independent cinema) outside of that world.
Hollywood would have us believe the greatest achievement for an actor is securing a big role in a cushy multi-picture deal, but Patel has always chosen varied roles, from the gentle laughs of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel through to his voice work in dubbed versions of Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday and Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body. This path has worked to his advantage, even if the pitfalls and institutional racial stereotyping within the industry have held him up along the way. His stunning turn in The Green Knight is only further evidence that Patel is one of the most compelling actors working today – long may his reign continue.
Hannah Strong (@thethirdhan) is the Associate Editor at Little White Lies. She is currently writing a book about film and raising one beautiful houseplant. She considers both of these things as equally important.