After ‘Slumdog,’ Dev Patel Gets Role in Shyamalan Film
By LISA TSERING
indiawest.com February 05, 2009 03:10:00 PM
Dev Patel keeps a tuxedo at the ready these days, as the 18-year-old British actor makes an appearance on the red carpet at awards shows seemingly every other day. Patel plays Jamal Malik, an impoverished Mumbai chaiwallah-turned-crorepati in Danny Boyle’s Oscar-nominated “Slumdog Millionaire.”
But Patel is also in the news this week after the announcement Feb. 1 that he had accepted a starring role in M. Night Shyamalan’s next film, “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” The film, which will start production next month in Greenland, is a live-action version of the hit Nickelodeon cartoon series and will be produced by Paramount Pictures.
“I went for an audition for Shyamalan way back, before I did ‘Slumdog,’” Patel told India-West from Los Angeles Feb. 2. “Shyamalan saw me in ‘Slumdog,’ and he really liked me, and I just got a call from him, saying I’d be great for the character. I’d love to do it.”
Patel will play Zuko, a member of the Fire Nation (the lead characters correspond to the four elements). He will join “Avatar’s” cast for a boot camp before shooting begins, to familiarize them with the martial arts moves.
“Because I’m so new to the business, I’m so glad to learn. After doing a very performance-oriented role in ‘Slumdog,’ this one is an action flick, with lots of CGI [computer generated imagery],” said Patel. “I do want to hone in on this, and express myself physically.”
“Avatar” will draw upon Patel’s own expert martial arts skills — it isn’t widely known that the actor has a black belt in Tae Kwondo.
“I used to teach ‘Little Dragons,’ 7-14 years old,” he laughed. “I was the first junior black belt in my academy.” Patel also won a bronze medal in the 2004 Tae Kwondo world championships.
“I used to train three times a week, and each session was two-and-half hours long,” he said — but that was before the “Slumdog” shoot, followed by a hectic schedule of film festivals, promotion and awards. “Now I’m getting a bit rusty.”
Traveling to Mumbai to shoot the film with Danny Boyle was itself a life-changing experience for Patel, especially as a diaspora Indian learning about his home culture.
“It sounds really cheesy, but it was very empowering and enlightening,” he told India-West. I really felt that I found a piece of myself.
“I went to India once before, when I was around 7 years old, to a family wedding in Gujarat. I was too young to absorb anything. But it was amazing destiny that I got cast in this film.
“I went to Mumbai — which is a totally different world from Gujarat — and I went with a passionate film crew. They showed me places I’d never get to see on holiday. I feel so much fuller, and more whole, and very proud of who I am now.”
Patel explored the slums of Dharavi and Mahim to get into character. “It really helped me to break through my preconceived notions of what I thought life in the slums would be like,” he said. “We associate slums with people who pity themselves and live in abject poverty, but really, they’re very functional places, very powerful. In a slum with a population of two million people, every person there has a vote. They’re like cities within cities.”
“Slumdog” was only Patel’s second acting gig. His first acting job was playing an oversexed British teenager in the BBC series “Skins.”
Patel read Vikas Swarup’s novel “Q&A,” on which the film is based, and saw the lead character in a new way. The protagonist of the novel is an orphan named Ram Mohammad Thomas, whose unlikely name allows him to fit in wherever he needs to.
“The script and the book were very different,” said Patel. “Simon [screenwriter Simon Beaufoy] told me that Ram Mohammad Thomas had a name that made him special, in a way. But we wanted Jamal Malik to be an absolutely average Joe. We wanted him to be a nobody, a rough diamond, that if you saw him in the street you wouldn’t notice anything special about him.”
Working opposite Bollywood legend Anil Kapoor was a dream come true for Patel, who said he grew up watching Hindi films in Britain. “When I learned I’d be cast opposite him, I was starstruck,” he said. “It’s great for a new actor like me to watch and learn from him. He was great. He’s so good at playing Prem, this sort of over-the-top guy who plays the crowd — his oxygen is the crowd’s love for him.
“We had a big contrast — I wanted to make my character very understated and soft-spoken, and to overcome this beast that was Anil Kapoor.”
“Now, when I walk down the street in L.A., Indians come up to me and say, ‘We’re proud to be who we are now, because of this film.’ When I hear things like that, it’s very nice.”
Patel has gotten used to the five-star hotels, the popping flash photography and the standing ovations, but, he says, “I think I am grounded, hopefully. I contstantly feel like a very lucky, blessed kid to even be a part of this project. I worked really hard to impress Danny every day on the set. I was close to a mental breakdown, because of the pressure I was under at 17.
“I just want to hang out with my school friends, and listen to music. Just the normal teenager stuff,” he chuckled.
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Originally Posted by Psycho Mantis
