The obvious question that comes to mind before meeting Dev Patel, the young star of 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, is how the rookie has been changed by success. On a bright spring morning in Los Angeles, the answer arrives as soon as Patel bounds into a suite at the Sunset Tower Hotel to discuss his second film, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. Now 20, Patel has the same puppy-dog enthusiasm, the same mama’s-boy manners and the same big ears that endeared him to fans around the world.
That’s not to say he was entirely unaffected by Slumdog, which won eight Academy Awards, including best picture. “I grew up five years in the space of five months,” Patel says. “I thought that I was a big comedian in school, but here I was working with adults and they took me seriously. That gave me a confidence I never knew I had.”
It shows. Although still thin as an asparagus, Patel wears a navy shirt over a filmy T-shirt that gives him a hint of geeky sex appeal. He’ll likely never be a true Hollywood bad boy, but at least he has developed an edge.
For his role in Airbender, Patel needed all the dark charisma he could muster. The movie, out in July, is a megabudget superhero epic, and Patel plays Zuko, a troubled prince who must choose between good and evil in his quest for fatherly approbation. “He’s got an Anakin Skywalker kind of thing going on,” says Patel. The part had him performing martial arts (he’s a real-life black belt), playing with fire and strutting around in major makeup like a “badass,” he says.
“Zuko is my favorite, the Shakespearean Hamlet character, and Dev had a take on it unlike anyone else,” recalls Shyamalan, who first saw Patel in a video shot during Airbender’s worldwide casting call, before the filmmaker had seen Slumdog or even heard the actor’s name. “He didn’t look like or sound like or perform the part like I had imagined, but he immediately popped out.” Later, when Shyamalan watched Slumdog, he realized that the lead was the same unknown actor he was considering for Zuko and, he says, “I knew I wasn’t crazy.”
The big surprise for Patel on his sophomore screen outing was the difference between the set of a $150 million movie and the slums of Mumbai, where Slumdog was shot for a 10th as much. “It was overwhelming,” he says. “Everything was bigger in America. I had my own trailer, which was like, wow.”
Born in London to parents of Indian ancestry who were raised in Kenya, Patel got his big break at an open casting for the British TV comedy Skins. It was that show that brought him to the attention of Slumdog director Danny Boyle. At various points Patel refers to himself as British or Asian, although in most ways he seems more a product of London than the subcontinent. “I can’t speak Gujarati too well, which is what my grandparents speak,” he admits. Nonetheless, he’s aware that in the eyes of casting agents, he is Indian first and foremost, which, he says, means reading for parts as the terrorist, the taxi driver, the smart geek or any “guy named Raj.”
