If Dev Patel didn’t exist, he would have to be invented
It’s not often that an actor gets to play virtually the same role twice in a short career. But it says a lot about the stories coming out of India and the lack of courage of our male actors in auditioning for international roles that Dev Patel gets to play — the heartbreaking role of an abandoned child who runs away from home and becomes a success twice in eight years.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Dev Patel. He has a certain fresh faced quality that endears him to the audience even when he is doing things clearly out of his league, like playing a Tamil Brahmin maths genius in The Man Who Knew Infinity. Or when he is being Gunga Din and calling the lissome Lilette Dubey Mummyji in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in the most idiotic Indian accent after Peter Sellers in The Party (Hrundi V Bakshi, anyone?).
His is the kind of face on which Jeremy Irons can project gravitas and the combined talents of Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith and the very naughty Bill Nighy can project all their faded ambition.
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| A still from Lion. |
I also like the fact that he works under the radar, letting his work speak for himself, and has the kind of equanimity required to survive being cast in one of the worst M Night Shyamalan movies (The Last Airbender). That’s quite a feat given the rate at which Night Shyamalan has made terrible movies since The Sixth Sense.
But the best thing about Dev Patel is that if he didn’t exist he would have to be invented. Simply because Bollywood men are too timid to go where the women have — like Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone, who started with a TV series and a big role in a big franchise respectively. Or Nimrat Kaur, who took on a powerful cameo in a hugely popular series like Homeland.
Think of it.
Slumdog Millionaire was offered to a series of young actors in Mumbai — no one had the right physicality for it, Danny Boyle said, which was a polite way of saying everyone refused him. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which put Riz Ahmed on the map, was offered to Ranbir Kapoor by Mira Nair but he said he just didn’t understand the role.
I haven’t spoken to Gurinder Chadha but I won’t be surprised if she probably offered Manish Dayal’s role in Viceroy’s House to several of our male leading men, who equally probably turned her down.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that Dev Patel is one of the best we’ve got (or haven’t got given his parents are Gujaratis from Kenya). It’s like Naseeruddin Shah being taken to an all expenses paid trip to London when they’d already decided that Ben Kingsley would get the role of the Mahatma.
No matter how wonderful our actors, the West has a certain expectation of how Indians should be portrayed on screen. Remember Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal in Million Dollar Arm? Now recall their accents — if they’d been authentic and tried Indian regional accents, they would never have been understood. Too much nuance is not a good thing.
It took a while for Irrfan Khan to get to the point where he can play a man of any nationality in his own accent — what’s his nationality in Jurassic Park? In Inferno? He could be from anywhere — just as British actors are better at playing Americans than Americans themselves, from Cary Grant to Tom Hiddleston.
Dev Patel is different. He looks brown enough to pass for a white man’s version of brown and white enough for brown people to adopt him, and does just the right kind of accent the English/Americans think most Indians have. Need proof that they don’t spend much time thinking too deeply about who to cast in the few central roles for Indians that are available?
Take Burberry’s tweet confusing Dev Patel and Riz Ahmed at the BAFTAs. This is not to undermine Dev Patel’s performance in Lion. Absent for half of the film, by the time he does make an appearance, his character Saroo has been through the worst deprivations possible — being separated from his mother, his brother, nearly been sexually assaulted, been sent to a Dickensian era orphanage.
But Dev Patel’s gift is that he is able to contain all this pain within a calm, sunny exterior; be a loving son to a wonderful Nicole Kidman and yet be a man in search of his own identity.
The transition from the child actor Sunny Pawar to young man Dev Patel is almost seamless, and that gives the film its depth and drama. The naturally wide smile is pulled back, the eyes troubled and the general mien reserved. Ah yes, and the accent, Australian, is spot on.
Will he win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor on Monday? If he does, good for him. It will definitely mean more work for him.
More stories are being told out of India, either made by Indians for the world, or by the world from India, as it should be. But as long as India’s male stars remain reluctant to have the courage to audition for roles in big films, and are content to be big fish in relatively smaller ponds, the tribe of Dev Patels will grow.