Dev Patel was enjoying the ride, but people were saying the horse was too small. It was the winter of 2019. Patel was in Ireland, preparing for his latest film, The Green Knight, in which he spends long periods on horseback, slogging through wilderness. The Green Knight is directed by the American filmmaker David Lowery, who, while casting around, “got hooked on the magnificent image of Dev in armour, astride a horse,” he told me recently. The armour looked good in rehearsals, but the horse? “I was like, ‘Look! It’s amazing! Look how good I am!’” Patel recalls. “And then I’d watch the video back and be like, ‘OK, this is really embarrassing.’” The horse’s name was Sparkles. “She looked like a Shetland pony. I would sit on her and, literally, my toes would be scraping along the ground.” Eventually he was upgraded to a larger animal: “This wonderful horse called Armani. Real attitude. I’d steal apples from the hotel lobby and feed them to him.”
Patel, in a grey jumper, his dark hair pushed back, is speaking over Zoom from Adelaide, where he is staying with his girlfriend, the Australian actor Tilda Cobham-Hervey. We have been discussing his acting process, which he describes, glibly, as “90% panic, 10% it just happens.” “On my first day I got food poisoning,” he goes on. “Finally, after all this prep, Day One comes and I’m up this bloody mountain, it’s freezing cold, I’m swamped in armour and then…” He shakes his head. “I’m about to shit myself on this horse.” He had to return to his trailer, terrified he’d let everyone down, his neuroses firing. “David’s worried. All the producers are, like, ‘What’s going on? Who is this guy?’”
To spend time with Patel is to witness this gentle self-deprecation served over and again; after more than a decade in the film industry, he remains excessively humble. Really, he is in the middle of a very good career. Slumdog Millionaire, his breakout film, was released 13 years ago, when he was 18. He was known then for being big-hearted and goofy, almost cartoonish. (Because he was quite gangly, it seemed like he had yet to fully grow into himself.) His recent films, including the real-life dramas Lion and Hotel Mumbai, have been more thoughtful, less energetic, though the heart is still there, sometimes laid bare. Throughout his career he has been described as likable, even “loving”, as though he brims with bonus humanity, and he has maintained a general good-guy aura. Shortly into our conversation I realise I have just assumed him to be friendly, and then wait to see if he proves me wrong, which he never does.
I ask him about the loving thing.
“Oh man,” he says. “Do loving people say they’re loving?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
He throws the question over to Cobham-Hervey, who he calls Tilly, Tills, or T.
“T,” Patel says. “Peek your head around.”
From a mezzanine above Patel’s head, Cobham-Hervey peeks her head around, appearing as a small dot on my screen.
“Is he loving?” I say.
“Am I loving?” Patel asks.
“He’s very loving,” Cobham-Hervey says. “But he probably can’t say that.”
She disappears. (You feel she gets roped into conversations like this a lot.) Patel shakes his head. “I’m an arsehole, really,” he says, grinning. Though soon he adds: “You know, I’m not the best with compliments. That’s something I’m trying to work through. I’m trying to accept them more.”
In The Green Knight, Patel plays Gawain, debauched nephew of King Arthur, knight of the Round Table, who must decide whether or not to embark on a quest for honour. It’s a troubling conundrum. Greatness awaits if he accepts, so long as he avoids a violent death. If he declines, he’ll live a decent, albeit insignificant life. In one scene, Patel ponders the question at the heart of the decision with the Swedish actor Alicia Vikander, who plays Essel, Gawain’s low-born lover:
Essel: “This is how silly men perish.”
Gawain: “Or how brave men become great.”
Essel: “Why greatness? Why is goodness not enough?”
When Patel was offered the part, he accepted immediately. He’d been enthralled by the script, which had “put me in a spell”. But he’d also been fascinated by Gawain’s decision. “I took a lot from this man’s journey,” he says. “It’s a story of success, but at what cost?” Since Patel became an actor, at 16, appearing in the teen TV drama Skins, this question has kept him up at night. It has recently become “a constant battle,” he says, “balancing your ambition with your greater consciousness and your wellbeing and your relationships to the people closest to you. Because, you know, ambition is beautiful, but you have to remember what you’re doing it for.” He recalls using his first Skins pay cheque to buy his sister a new bed. “That was like, ‘This is amazing!’” He felt he was doing good. But as his career has developed, his priorities have shifted, or have been shifted for him. He remembers attending red carpet events, fresh to the industry, in borrowed suits, star-struck; just to be there was enough. Now he is expected to campaign for awards. In the lead-up to receiving an Oscar nomination, in 2017, for his appearance in Lion, he recalls asking: “What does this mean, if I were to get this thing? What if I do get nominated – what is that? It becomes that scary seed of hope that you’d never even thought about.”
Patel had not been thinking about it. He grew up in Rayners Lane, northwest London. If he had any ambition to become an award-winning actor, he didn’t show it. His mother, Anita, is a care worker; his father, Raj, is an IT consultant. Both are Gujarati Indians from Nairobi, and first generation British immigrants. Patel’s mother, who he has descried as “jovial”, “a social butterfly” and “the one made for screen, not me”, dragged him to an open casting for Skins and, after a call-back, he was offered the part of Anwar Kharral, a British Pakistani teenager. He recounts filming his early scenes as tumultuous. “There wasn’t, like, a safety demonstration for how this goes, you know?” Being on set was confounding. “I’m like, ‘What’s that?’” He waves his hands in the air. “It’s a boom mic.” (He admits later, “Sometimes I’ll learn the hard way.”) At school Patel had developed a self-defensive habit of being funny: “The bigger and goofier you are, the more willing you are to be stupid, the more laughs you get from your peers” – and the less likely you are to be bullied for being “that guy fresh off the boat, or whatever”. In Skins he continued the pattern. “I’d throw every emotion at it: happy, sad, melancholic – all there in one line.”
When he began filming Slumdog Millionaire, he went big, too. He remembers cracking jokes for the film’s director, Danny Boyle, who laughed along for a while, before offering some advice. “He said, ‘You know, if you’re going to be the lead in this, you have to have stillness,’” Patel recalls. He was confused. “I thought, Stillness? That’s not acting. What are they paying me for? I’ve got to do something.” But gradually the lesson stuck. Patel appears in almost every scene of The Green Knight. In many of them he brings restraint, dignity and quietude. Often he crosses broad landscapes in silence, a speck in the wilderness, somehow retaining the viewer’s focus. Only sometimes does the old Patel appear, the charming playfulness, brief glimpses of naive benevolence. (Lowery told me he cast Patel partly because, “I sought an actor whose side the audience would immediately take, no matter how unlikeable his character might be.”) In Patel’s mind, the fact he is now being asked to play parts like this is a measure of his progress. He describes Gawain as a “top-tier role”: “When you get to be still and soulful. When you’re not trying to push something. You’re not jabbing on about something. You’re not having to be a piece of comedic relief. You can just… be.”
When Patel broke into stardom, after Slumdog, he expected to land bigger, stiller parts, but none came. Often he had to “wait for an Indian role to come by, where I could put on a thick accent,” because “there wasn’t anything else, it was literally the clichés: goofy sidekick, taxi driver.” For a while he didn’t work. “I was dating my co-star at the time, Freida [Pinto], and she went on to do all of these amazing things. But in a way, she, too, was being type-cast, as this exotic beauty next to all these Caucasian leading men.”
In several of his films, including Slumdog, Hotel Mumbai, and both Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, Patel has been asked to put on the accent. He is still largely known for playing characters related to India. But in The Green Knight he speaks in what is essentially his normal voice: middle English, frequently buoyant. It is also a role for which his brown skin is not a requisite of character. (Every other knight around Arthur’s table is white.) Recently, he has discovered directors – including Lowery and Armando Iannucci, who cast Patel in The Personal History of David Copperfield – who are unconcerned by the colour of his skin. “I’m the one that is fixated on it,” Patel says. Before filming Copperfield, in which he “basically plays Charles Dickens”, he asked Iannucci: “Wait, so is his mum going to be brown? How are we going to talk about that? Is there going to be, like, a scene where they, like, arrive on a boat?” Iannucci said no, to which Patel recalls offering, “Look, I’m really appreciative, but I’m also sorry, because I know you’re going to face a barrage of comments.” He worried he might distract from the greater themes of the film. “Because everyone’s going to be so fixated on the colour of the lead’s skin.”
Perhaps inevitably, Iannucci did receive comments. (Copperfield was cast colour-blind.) People thought: why is a brown-skinned man playing the role of a white author? But throughout his career, people have also asked why Patel, a British Asian man, has played so many Indian characters. This bothers him. “You’re kind of like, Where am I allowed to exist? How specific are we going to get with this? What does it mean to be an actor – to just be yourself? Am I only allowed to play a guy who’s 31 years old? Are you going to check my blood type?” He’s incredulous. “The very essence of acting, it asks for you to perform, transform, change, that’s the allure of the job… And 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.”
When I ask if the industry is doing enough for actors of colour, he says, “You know, it’s moving in the right direction. My mate Daniel Kaluuya just won an Oscar!” Then he adds, “And there are so many beautiful films in the mix now.” He begins listing some: Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Parasite. “We’re getting more nourished as a society for it.” He was thrilled when he found out Copperfield was being shown in schools. “It’s more indicative of the Britain I grew up in. It makes it more accessible. I didn’t know what David Copperfield was. I couldn’t relate to that. Fifteen-year-old Dev couldn’t see his face in that, couldn’t understand it.” But there are “people out there like me, who grew up in the same position, who share two identities… People are going to relate to this material.”
Still, Patel feels at home in the industry, and he has developed a reputation in film as a hard, reliable worker. While shooting The Green Knight, he refused to “let himself off easy, or to stop too soon,” Lowery told me. “He’d often ask for additional takes, long after I think a scene might be as good as it’s going to get, because he knows there’s something more that he hasn’t uncovered yet. It was amazing and sometimes startling to watching him tear himself to pieces in pursuit of something truthful and honest.” Both Danny Boyle and the Australian filmmaker Garth Davis, who directed Patel in Lion, have offered similar compliments. (“I gave him a challenge,” Davis once said of Patel’s auditions, “and he embraced it.”) When I ask Patel where his work rate comes from, he says, “I’m just very tough on myself,” before adding, “I don’t know if that comes from growing up in an immigrant family, that it’s in our blood that we have to work doubly hard.” Later he says, “I’m always working from a place of never feeling good enough. And I work on that.”
At school, Patel withheld his immigrant heritage. “I was trying to be like Dizzee Rascal. That was what was expected.” It was acting, eventually, that brought him back to India. (He has described the country as “a constant source of inspiration.”) But it is also acting that is now taking him beyond it. After Lion, he says, “I feel like, instead of seeing me as ‘the Indian guy’, people were looking at me as the everyman. And that was the place I always wanted to be. I wanted be part of that conversation. ‘Oh, you’ve got an everyman in a story – why can’t that be me?’”
The Green Knight is coming soon