Dev Patel, who shot to fame with 'Slumdog Millionaire', is all grown up now

Patel's films this year at TIFF, which contain his most intense roles yet, show his maturity as an actor

When terrorists were on the rampage across Mumbai on November 26, 2008, Dev Patel was savouring the runaway success of his breakthrough film Slumdog Millionaire. It had caught the world’s attention when it was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September that year and had minted a new, 18-year-old star in the boyish Indo-British actor. 

The euphoria collapsed that day in late November, when Patel returned to his London home and found his parents glued to the television. As the news sank in, the memories came rushing back, especially the joyous dance sequence he had shot for at the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus. Now it was a scene of carnage. “He [director Danny Boyle] added this dance sequence at the end of the film as a kind of an ode to India and its cinema,” recalled Patel, speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. He added, “And then to come back after this amazing journey and see that happen to this place that was bursting with life, people and children everywhere you looked, it was very difficult.”

Ten years later, here he was, 28 years old, back at TIFF, this time for the world premiere of Hotel Mumbai, a film based on the 26/11 attack, especially the events that unfolded at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. It could have been a cinematic device straight out of Slumdog Millionaire. But this was no coincidence. When Patel learned that Australian director Anthony Maras was planning a film about the attack, he immediately tried to get on board. “It’s horrible what happened there, so many places that were attacked, so when there was a film being made I felt compelled to seek it out and be a part of it,” Patel said in Toronto. 

A still from Dev Patel’s upcoming film Hotel Mumbai

It wasn’t always this way for this British kid from a middle-class Gujarati Hindu family whose roots go back to India and Kenya. Growing up in the London suburb of Harrow, a neighbourhood with a large immigrant Indian community, Patel was often uncomfortable with his ethnic identity. “I spent most of my existence in school trying to shun my heritage,” he had told this correspondent in an earlier interview. Things changed after his mother, a votary of all sorts of extra-curricular activities, especially martial arts, for her hyperactive son, took him to an audition for the British television show Skins. Patel was only 16 when he landed the part of a British Muslim teenager in the series about youngsters obsessed with drugs, alcohol and sex. He had no idea what he had got into with the raunchy show, but it soon led to the role of Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire.

“And then I kind of discovered India, Bombay, with Slumdog and I was completely just struck by lightning. It’s just so enthralling to me to go back, and this sounds very clichéd, but I understand myself and where I come from, more and more,” Patel had said in the interview.

In Hotel Mumbai, Patel is Arjun, a waiter at the Taj who plays a heroic role trying to save the hotel’s guests and others who sought shelter there. He’s back in a Mumbai slum for the role, but now the boy is all grown up. The film also illustrates how far the actor has grown in his career. He saw a project he was interested in, pursued it and got the part. 

And that’s not all — he had the power to define his own part. Arjun was to be a composite character, drawn from the stories of several staff members at the Taj, but Patel wanted to tell a larger story through his role. “I read these articles about Sikh cab drivers in New York being attacked after September 11 and being labelled terrorists and I thought we could make this man a Sikh. In the four walls of this hotel with people turning on each other and pressures running high, you can break down a stereotype and educate the audience on their culture,” he explained.

 Patel’s growing influence is evident in the fact that he is also listed as an executive producer for Hotel Mumbai. In fact, this year, the actor has two films at TIFF; he also stars in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest. He is also a producer of the second film, and his influence and initiative in getting it off the ground greatly impressed the veteran British filmmaker. 

Winterbottom had sent him the script just last October and Patel got back immediately to say he liked it and as he had a gap in his work the following January and February, could he shoot for the film then? Winterbottom was taken aback; he hadn’t even started to think about financing the project. In an interview at TIFF, the director recalled, “He said ‘Oh I think I can get that sorted out’. So Dev actually raised all the cash and three weeks later we were in pre-production and then 12 weeks after sending him the script we were filming.” From a wide-eyed youngster walking the red carpet in his school shoes, Patel had become a mover and shaker in the industry. 

Patel’s films this year at TIFF, which contain his most intense roles yet, are polar opposites of each other and show his maturity as an actor. In Hotel Mumbai, he is a simple, decent man who steps up to do the right thing. In The Wedding Guest, he is a cold-blooded mercenary who eventually reveals a vulnerable side. After seeing Patel in the 2016 film Lion, a role which earned him an Oscar nomination, Winterbottom was convinced he had finally found an actor for the script he had written nearly a decade ago. 

“You kind of want to watch him, you want to go on his journey. Very few actors have that quality, I think. He’s done great work and the more work he does, the richer, more complex his performance has got,” Winterbottom said. Radhika Apte, Patel’s co-star in The Wedding Guest, added, “It’s just amazing to see Dev’s journey. He is literally transformed, and this badass guy in The Wedding Guest is so not him. I keep telling him, ‘You can get away with everything just because you’re sweet.’” 

Indeed, he has carried off a wide variety of roles since Slumdog Millionaire, from goofball to genius, and worked with an enviable list of stars including Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Jeremy Irons. But he has mostly played South Asian characters. Now Patel is poised to break another barrier, by playing the quintessentially British character of David Copperfield in a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic novel. Speaking in Toronto, he disarmingly declared he hadn’t read the book and initially thought the part was that of the well-known American magician. But he’s aware that this colour-blind casting will have a larger impact. “Kids like me that grew up where I grew up are going to be able to watch it and finally be able to relate to it and not be the doofus that I was and go, what, the magician? And go, oh yeah, I can see myself in that film and relate to it,” Patel said.

With his boyish charm and dapper looks, can the fashion world be far away? Patel has also recently starred with Spanish actor Javier Bardem in a much-talked-about campaign for the luxury fashion brand Ermenegildo Zegna.  

Stardom has come quickly to Patel, but he insists it hasn’t changed him because even though he has moved from Harrow to Hollywood, he still does “normal s*** like everyone else”, as he earlier told The Guardian newspaper. “People ask how hard it is to stay grounded. It’s f***ing easy… My friends’ circle is very small, and that’s a conscious choice.” He has also often talked about being close to his parents and elder sister, but rarely comments on his break-up about four years ago with his former co-star Freida Pinto after a six-year relationship. 

Patel’s return to TIFF this year marks his transformation from boy wonder to man of the world. It also connects Mumbai and Toronto, two cities that once changed his life, and could do so again as he enters the next stage of his career.