Slumdog to top dog: Dev Patel turns his hand to the hero role

Dev Patel says his new medieval role has forced him to dig deep in confronting his impostor syndrome.

Dev Patel in The Green Knight. Photo by: Eric Zachanowich

Time has been kind to Dev Patel. The Slumdog Millionaire star and go-to guy for smiley sweet-natured “gangly kind of characters” (his words) has suddenly, at 31, emerged as a heavyweight hero and swoon-worthy leading man in one of the movies of the year – The Green Knight. He’s the taciturn, axe-wielding Gawain in a gorgeous and soulful adaptation of the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s a breathtaking film that demands of Patel the kind of brow-furrowing gravitas that holds together an entire production about medieval knights and giants and ghosts without a single titter of irony (Monty Python it ain’t).

It’s a film, also, that asks the former Skins and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel actor to age decades, to rise from squire to king, to be vulnerable, then ruthless, then embittered, and always to be searching for the meaning of life. “Wait!” Gawain barks from the ground in one crucial scene, when it appears as if his mortal enemy, the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), is about to gain the upper hand and finally behead him. “Is this really all there is?” It’s the kind of monumental line that only a handful of young actors today could deliver with conviction (possibly Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya or Florence Pugh). And yet Patel makes it sing – your heart will break for him.

“For this film I got stripped of all that wide-eyed and open vulnerability stuff that I normally lean into,” he says, acknowledging the departure that he has made from his regular post-Slumdog types. “I got to play someone who becomes cold and callous and broken and jaded along the way.” He’s speaking from the flat in Adelaide that he shares with his partner, the Australian actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey, whom he met on the set of Hotel Mumbai in 2018. He is working in Australia on the edit of his directorial debut, Monkey Man (more on that later). He knows that The Green Knight is something special, and he describes how he canvassed for the role from the moment he read the screenplay by the film’s writer-director David Lowery. “David was talking to a whole load of hot young actors at the time, but I knew that if I could just get on the phone with him there would be a synergy there between us. And luckily there was,” Patel says.

The film was shot in Ireland in the spring of 2019, and Patel reminisces about the coldness of the weather, the desolate mountain locations, and the day, early in the shoot, when he caught food poisoning and projectile vomited while in knightly costume (“I think the producers were very worried, at that point, like, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”). And yet he is sceptical about being declared the “new” Dev, reborn, finally, as a megastar in waiting. Because he has been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.

I met him in 2010, when he had just starred in the $150 million ($206 million AUD) blockbuster flop The Last Airbender, which had been chosen to position him as a global star. Patel had only recently emerged from the Slumdog awards season hoopla and his profile was sky-high. He had rubbed shoulders with Clint Eastwood and Mickey Rourke, and was famously slapped on the red carpet by Sharon Stone. Not like that – he joked that he couldn’t quite believe that he was in such auspicious company and needed a wake-up slap and so, Stone, near by, reached over and obliged.

Yet when we spoke about The Last Airbender it was obvious that he had regrets, not just about the title (“I’m, like, ‘Benders’? Really?”), but about his emerging fame and his lack of control over everything around him. “At this stage in my career I don’t have as much say as I would like,” he said, tactfully, before describing the strains that fame was putting on his relationship at the time with his co-star Freida Pinto (“We’re, like, living in this crazy fishbowl!”).

Today, he says: “That really was like being a lobster thrown into a boiling pot. It was ridiculous in every sense. I was plucked from my box room in Rayners Lane (in Harrow, northwest London). I was travelling everywhere by train and then suddenly I’m on the front page of the paper, and there’s that moment in the carriage where every head, one by one, like meerkats, begins to turn and stare. It was a crazy experience. And I still feel like that today, in some ways. You can’t take that Rayners Lane kid out of me.”

Patel was raised in that London suburb, with his older sister, Trushna, by his father, Raju, an IT consultant, and his mother, Anita, a care worker. He describes his childhood in loving terms and his younger self as a hyperactive youth who found outlets and expression in drama clubs and martial arts (he’s a first dan black belt in taekwondo). It was Anita who spotted an advert in Metro in 2007, for a new teenage drama called Skins and, according to Patel, “dragged” him along to audition. He nabbed the part of cheeky oversexed student Anwar and was spotted by Danny Boyle’s daughter Caitlin when her father was struggling to cast the lead role in Slumdog Millionaire. And the rest, of course, is a momentary burst of hype and hysteria and the promise of international stardom, followed by low-key roles (see the Marigold Hotel movies) and an interesting turn as the office nerd Neal in Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant and underrated TV drama The Newsroom.

On learning Sorkin’s infamously dense, polysyllabic and vividly political dialogue, Patel says: “It was a tough process for me. As much as I enjoyed the cast and being lucky enough to work for Aaron, for me it was difficult to vomit out that amount of information every day. I was on the internet every night, trying to figure out who this senator was and what they did. It was like cramming for an exam every single night, which is not particularly the way I enjoy working.”

The highlights since have included his turn as an assassin with a heart of gold in The Wedding Guest, and as Saroo Brierley, the real-life man who searched for his home and his roots in Lion, for which he was Oscar-nominated. The Green Knight, however, is the game-changer. And in the role itself, Patel says, he sees the arc of his own professional journey. “Even though it’s a medieval film, there are a lot of parallels for me with a young actor’s journey through their career,” he says. “The idea of being known and having ambition, but at what cost? And the idea that Gawain is surrounded at the round table by all these legends and not feeling worthy himself. I very often found myself in that situation where I have this impostor syndrome, just like him.”

Next up he is starring in his own directorial debut, Monkey Man, which he says is an “action revenge movie” that was shot in Indonesia just before the pandemic struck. An Australian co-production, it’s backed by the makers of the Keanu Reeves action-franchise John Wick, so requires Patel to dig deep into his martial arts past. “Honestly, I hadn’t practised in a long time,” he says. “But these were the producers who did John Wick, so I had to turn up and try my best to kick some arse as well as I could.”

For now, though, he’s obsessing about returning to Rayners Lane for his first trip home in 18 months, and with working on a series of top-secret projects (he’s also a producer now). As for his future as a heavyweight hero and swoon-worthy leading man? He’s too bashful for that. And too modest. “Right now, as long as I get to be on set and work with some interesting people, I’m happy,” he says. “Yes. I’m a happy boy.”

The Green Knight is streaming on Amazon Prime from October 28.

– The Times