Speaker 1: Pushkin, Hey, it's Sam before we get rolling. This month
Speaker 1: actually marks the eight year anniversary of Talk Easy. I
Speaker 1: think we've done nearly four hundred episodes in that time
Speaker 1: with people I had long dreamt of sitting with when
Speaker 1: I first started the show back in twenty sixteen. People
Speaker 1: like Tom Hanks, Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Questlove jumple of Hero,
Speaker 1: David byrd, Ethan Hawk, Zadi Smith, Oscar Isaac, Margot Jefferson,
Speaker 1: David Sedaris, Stacy Abrams. The list really does go on
Speaker 1: and on. I should also add both my mother and
Speaker 1: father have come on the program. If I don't mention them,
Speaker 1: I will get a call on a Sunday morning. And
Speaker 1: yet I have to say sometimes I really do feel
Speaker 1: like we're just getting started here, that there's so much
Speaker 1: left to do, so many people I'd still like to
Speaker 1: sit with, ideas and subjects that I want to explore
Speaker 1: in further detail. And so, if any of these four
Speaker 1: hundred ish conversations have stayed with you over the past
Speaker 1: eight years, inspired you to be more creative, or have
Speaker 1: just helped make meaning out of our brief time that
Speaker 1: we have here, I have a modest ask, emphasis on
Speaker 1: modest because it's not a lot. The first thing is
Speaker 1: to just share the show with a friend or a
Speaker 1: family member, or anyone that you think may be interested
Speaker 1: in the kinds of conversations we have here each and
Speaker 1: every week. Secondly, if you don't already, be sure to
Speaker 1: click the follow or subscribe button at the top of
Speaker 1: the platform that you're listening to this right now. I
Speaker 1: know that sounds very simple and silly, but both Spotify
Speaker 1: and Apple have updated their apps and in that process
Speaker 1: have like unfollowed and unsubscribed people. We did not take
Speaker 1: it personally, but I think also a lot of people
Speaker 1: don't know that this has happened. Regardless, you can follow
Speaker 1: and subscribe us on all the platforms. If you're on Spotify,
Speaker 1: you can actually click that little bell icon that way.
Speaker 1: Every time a new episode drops in the feed, you
Speaker 1: will receive a notification about it. The last thing, if
Speaker 1: you want to go above and beyond, and if you've
Speaker 1: already done one and two, the third thing you can
Speaker 1: do is just share the show on social media. We're
Speaker 1: at talk Easypod across all the platforms. You can always
Speaker 1: tag us if you'd like. We do try to share
Speaker 1: most of those in our feed when we can, and
Speaker 1: when we see them doing any or all of these
Speaker 1: things really does ensure that we can continue making this
Speaker 1: program each and every Sunday. And the last thing, not
Speaker 1: to get terribly sentimental, but if you're listening to this
Speaker 1: right now, whether it's your first time or the four
Speaker 1: hundredth time, thank you for being here. Because when I
Speaker 1: started the show in April of twenty sixteen, I was
Speaker 1: twenty one years old, fresh off a job at the
Speaker 1: Roxy Theater in San Francisco that I wasn't particularly good at.
Speaker 1: I didn't really know what I was going to do next,
Speaker 1: and there is no way I could have imagined that
Speaker 1: Talk Easy would turn into what it's become, that it
Speaker 1: would reach so many, mean so much to so many.
Speaker 1: So with that, to everyone who has reached out over
Speaker 1: the years, whether it's an email, a message on Instagram
Speaker 1: or Twitter, or in person at text, whatever you've done,
Speaker 1: or if you've just been quietly following along, thank you.
Speaker 1: Making something each week takes a lot out of all
Speaker 1: of us here that make it, and so every bit
Speaker 1: of encouragement that we've received, thank you for doing that,
Speaker 1: And it really does help us continue moving forward because
Speaker 1: it's not easy to continue moving forward. And with that,
Speaker 1: before I get even more sentimental, I'm just going to say,
Speaker 1: if you have any ideas for future episodes, you can
Speaker 1: always drop us a line at SF at talk easypod
Speaker 1: dot com. That's sf at talk easypod dot com. The
Speaker 1: newsletter is finally almost coming. I know I've been talking
Speaker 1: about it for like a year. You can subscribe to
Speaker 1: that by writing that email address sf at talk Easypod.
Speaker 1: You can also visit our website at talk easypod dot com,
Speaker 1: where there's a spot to subscribe. But eight years it's
Speaker 1: worth celebrating and acknowledging, and none of those years would
Speaker 1: have been possible without your listening. So thank you again.
Speaker 1: And with that, here is Dev Patel. This is Talk
Speaker 1: easy I'm standing for Gooso. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Today.
Speaker 1: I'm joined by actor and director Dev Pateel. Dev broke
Speaker 1: out over fifteen years ago in a film called slum
Speaker 1: Dog Millionaire, which won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Speaker 1: He was only eighteen years old at the time and
Speaker 1: had assumed, I think fairly that a fruitful acting career
Speaker 1: would follow, one filled with interesting, complex roles like the
Speaker 1: one Danny Boyle created to jumpstart his journey into movie making.
Speaker 1: But that's not exactly what happened. Instead, Hollywood did what
Speaker 1: it does best to people they don't understand, offered typecast,
Speaker 1: stereotypical roles that were caricatures of Patel, an Indian origin
Speaker 1: British actor. The roles verged on racist or at the
Speaker 1: very least one dimensional, and so for a decade, Patel
Speaker 1: fought through what he calls a sea of nothing, choosing
Speaker 1: choice parts and films like Hotel Mumbai, The Green Knight
Speaker 1: and Lion, for which he received a Best Supporting Actor
Speaker 1: nomination in twenty seventeen. He did all this while harboring
Speaker 1: another dream to step behind the camera and tell a
Speaker 1: story his grandfather had been telling him since he was
Speaker 1: a young boy growing up in Northwest London. That story,
Speaker 1: about a Hindu god who seeks retribution against corrupt leaders
Speaker 1: victimizing the poor, has now become Patel's directorial debut, a
Speaker 1: new movie called Monkey Man. Here's a clip from the trailer.
Speaker 2: In this city, the rich don't see us as people
Speaker 2: give me the job, no one wants to do handle it.
Speaker 1: Anyone forgets there. Please, it doesn't turn out went for them.
Speaker 1: This is not the place to work if you can't
Speaker 1: handle that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Every day I've prayed for a way to protect the week.
Speaker 1: That was from the new film Monkey Man, now playing
Speaker 1: in theaters across the country. We talked to Dev a
Speaker 1: few weeks after the film premiere at south By Southwest,
Speaker 1: where it won the audience Award, which makes a whole
Speaker 1: lot of sense, because this is a movie that needs
Speaker 1: to be seen in a theater. The action is propulsive
Speaker 1: and visceral and completely insane. Think The Raid, Redemption or
Speaker 1: John Wick with a Lot Less Cats. There were multiple
Speaker 1: times when I was watching this movie that I yelled
Speaker 1: at the screen in absolute disbelief, like I could not
Speaker 1: believe what I was seeing. I was so enthralled and
Speaker 1: mortified by the action, some of which I had to
Speaker 1: watch through the cracks of my fingers because I could
Speaker 1: not bear what was on screen. It is a one
Speaker 1: of a kind action movie and exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: film that you do not want to watch at home
Speaker 1: by yourself. It's meant to be played in a crowd,
Speaker 1: with the audience yelling at the screen together. It really
Speaker 1: is something I can't recommend highly enough, and evidently Jordan
Speaker 1: Peele and his company Monkey Paul felt the exact same
Speaker 1: way I did, because without Peel, this movie would have
Speaker 1: been straight to Netflix or Max or one of those streamers,
Speaker 1: and you would have just watched it at home. And instead,
Speaker 1: Monkey Man is exclusively in theaters around the country. If
Speaker 1: you want to see if it's playing at a theater
Speaker 1: near you, you can visit our website at talkasypod dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also click the link that we've put in
Speaker 1: the description. And so today, in Act one of the show,
Speaker 1: we talk about the decade long journey that Pateel went
Speaker 1: on to make Monkey Man possible. That there was ever
Speaker 1: a film that needed a director's commentary, it's this one.
Speaker 1: Then in Act two, we get into Patel's personal story,
Speaker 1: which may help explain why he did everything in his
Speaker 1: power to get his directorial debut to the finish line.
Speaker 1: And then finally, in Act three, we talk about what
Speaker 1: this film means to him now having made it, what
Speaker 1: he's learned from these last fifteen years in Hollywood, and
Speaker 1: what he hopes to make in the decade ahead.
Speaker 2: This is dev Patel Death. Paatel, how are you man?
Speaker 2: Nice to meet you? Likewise, how you doing, I'm good?
Speaker 1: Anything interesting happening in your life.
Speaker 2: There's so much happening, you know, finally giving birth to
Speaker 2: this little gremlin that's been occupying most of my life
Speaker 2: for over ten years. So okay that thing. Do you
Speaker 2: call it a gremlin? Often?
Speaker 1: I do?
Speaker 2: I do. I've said this before, but it's really been
Speaker 2: an obsession. I think anyone within a five foot radius
Speaker 2: of me at some point in recent histories though what
Speaker 2: I'm insane. But yeah, it's been a long journey. Why
Speaker 2: don't we just start with your insanity?
Speaker 1: Okay? That is this new film of yours. It's called
Speaker 1: Monkey Man. It's your directorial debut. You're also the star
Speaker 1: and the co writer of it, which is based on
Speaker 1: the story of Hanuman, the Hindu god whose shape is
Speaker 1: half monkey, half human, who uses his powers in the
Speaker 1: service of others. Yeah, this is a story your family
Speaker 1: has long been telling, because your father to this day
Speaker 1: where's a chain around his neck with little Hanuman statues.
Speaker 1: But I think it's your grandfather who first shared these
Speaker 1: epic Hindu stories on his visits from Kenya to Northwest London,
Speaker 1: where you grew up as a boy. How did your
Speaker 1: grandfather explain these stories to you?
Speaker 2: I mean it was just I was so desperate to
Speaker 2: spend time with him. He's such an incredible storyteller. He's
Speaker 2: so animated. He's got this kind of like half Indian
Speaker 2: half kind of like Kenyan twang, and he looks like
Speaker 2: the old man from up the Brown version. You know,
Speaker 2: he's got this beautiful head of like thick white hair.
Speaker 2: He yeah, we just spent in my little box room.
Speaker 2: I'd make him sit in there and he tell me
Speaker 2: these stories of Hanuman, and for me, it just reminded
Speaker 2: me of the iconographies of Superman splitting his test open
Speaker 2: to reveal his s very very similar to a story
Speaker 2: of Hanneman opening his chest up. Even the kind of
Speaker 2: way he's depicted flying is very similar to Superman. But
Speaker 2: as a kid that you know growing up in school,
Speaker 2: I guess I ran away from my culture or any
Speaker 2: any sort of association to the Indian part of myself
Speaker 2: to fit in. And you know, I was afraid I
Speaker 2: was going to stick out or be bullied or I
Speaker 2: didn't feel it was the coolest part of my identity.
Speaker 2: What did you think was the coolest partt I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, in the UK where I grew up, it's
Speaker 2: grime music and black culture basically.
Speaker 1: So this story didn't fit neatly within that.
Speaker 2: Well. This story actually was one of the things that
Speaker 2: I should say was something that I thought, this is
Speaker 2: so cool and I'd love to share, but not in
Speaker 2: the way of this you know, big mythical, kind of
Speaker 2: camp epic in a way. So that's where this story
Speaker 2: was born in trying to ground it and give it
Speaker 2: some weight and bring it into kind of today's world.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of the mythological action side of it.
Speaker 1: But as you start to consider making this film, what
Speaker 1: did you want to tackle in terms of the cast
Speaker 1: system and the way there's there's a war on poverty,
Speaker 1: because that's very much part of the writing of this movie.
Speaker 2: I think revenge. You know, this is a revenge film.
Speaker 2: Revenge is an incredibly maximal feeling and I believe it
Speaker 2: needs as maximal a catalyst. And as a huge fan
Speaker 2: of the genre, I it frustrates me when I see
Speaker 2: these kind of like run of the mill, you know,
Speaker 2: streaming kind of action films that come and go in
Speaker 2: a second. But for me, it is how can I
Speaker 2: double down, triple down on the culture and inject it
Speaker 2: into the genre and use it as a sort of
Speaker 2: trojan horse to capture those guys that watch the John
Speaker 2: Wick movies to Middle of America, the guys that play
Speaker 2: video games and talk about things. And you know the
Speaker 2: action structure all the way back from Bruce Lee in
Speaker 2: Game of Death he fights his way up a pagoda.
Speaker 2: There's a cast system to action till you reach the biggest,
Speaker 2: hardest boss. In that case, it was Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
Speaker 2: So for me, I was like, wow, we can talk
Speaker 2: about the car system. If this guy infiltrates this club
Speaker 2: we call King's Club, whether the untouchable elite, the kings
Speaker 2: of society go, and he's slaving away in this kind
Speaker 2: of windowless hell hole in the bottom, he can work
Speaker 2: his way up to challenge the gods of society and
Speaker 2: we can talk about something richer within that kind of scaffolding,
Speaker 2: which is action.
Speaker 1: So you bring all of this personal and political connection
Speaker 1: to the film and it takes about a decade. As
Speaker 1: my understanding, you first were talked into writing it, yeah,
Speaker 1: which you didn't want to do. Then you tried to
Speaker 1: enlist Neil Blancamp who made District nine, Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: said I think you should direct it, and come March
Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, you told the New York Times quote,
Speaker 1: I have a film called monkey Man that I'm going
Speaker 1: to direct this year. Hopefully. It's like a graphic novel
Speaker 1: coming to life, and it's really exciting. It's also a
Speaker 1: heart attack in the wings.
Speaker 2: Was Oh boy?
Speaker 1: Was March twenty nineteen Dev right about March twenty twenty dev?
Speaker 2: Oh boy? Was he right? And then some I think
Speaker 2: he underestimated future Dev. What was really interesting about the
Speaker 2: Hannemand mythology was he's this incredible superhero. Right. So if
Speaker 2: you go to India and you go to any gym
Speaker 2: and a slum there, you'll see Arnold Schwarzenegger on the walls.
Speaker 2: You'll see this British bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman, and you'll see Hanaumann.
Speaker 2: And he's in every rich Shaw swinging underneath the mirror.
Speaker 2: And for me, when you start reading about the mythologies,
Speaker 2: he got punished for basically touching the sun. It's a
Speaker 2: story very akin to Icarus. And for me, he was
Speaker 2: someone that lost faith in himself and his abilities, and
Speaker 2: it's kind of life imitating art. I thought of this film.
Speaker 2: I knew everything about it, but I didn't have faith
Speaker 2: in myself so there's no way I'm going to be
Speaker 2: to put a finger on a laptop and write something,
Speaker 2: so I should get someone else, let alone direct. And
Speaker 2: it was Neil That's like, dude, this is in you.
Speaker 2: It's in every cell of your body or you know,
Speaker 2: every corner, every frame of what you want to do.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I kind of took his faith and I
Speaker 2: kind of ran with it.
Speaker 1: So when the pandemic starts, yeah, you get the last
Speaker 1: seat out of Mumbai to go back where.
Speaker 2: We're in one of the biggest slums in Mumbai. I'm
Speaker 2: with my Korean DP. I've been there for months and
Speaker 2: months scouting, scouting, casting r you know, there was a
Speaker 2: hairy situation with the financiers where you know, money wasn't
Speaker 2: being released, so it was all of this stuff happening,
Speaker 2: and I'm turning down projects and my agents are like
Speaker 2: just come back, you know, don't worry about it, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, no, no, We're going to do this. And then
Speaker 2: we get whacked with this pandemic. And you know, all
Speaker 2: the kids in the slums have mobile phones, so they're
Speaker 2: seeing us foreigners and they start they're pointing out us,
Speaker 2: going COVID, GOVID and it turned into Mumbai was like
Speaker 2: twenty eight days later, like everyone had left me and
Speaker 2: kind of the key players had underestimated what this actually was,
Speaker 2: so we're like, how this will blow over? And I
Speaker 2: was in this hotel and by the end of it
Speaker 2: there was only me and I think like seven other guests.
Speaker 2: They'd switched draft all the lights in the hotel and
Speaker 2: traffic had stopped, so the air had cleared up. You
Speaker 2: could finally see the clear skies in Mumbai. I could
Speaker 2: see the kind of city scape from my window. But
Speaker 2: the Dreamer died. We had to get out, and the
Speaker 2: film had basically tanked.
Speaker 1: The financiers call you, they say, dev it's a pandemic.
Speaker 1: We're not making a movie. It's time to pack it in,
Speaker 1: come home. What does your hail Mary's speech sound like
Speaker 1: to them? How do you convince them to keep going?
Speaker 2: That speech hadn't happened yet. There's many kind of brave
Speaker 2: heart speech moments. But you know, we'd spent so much
Speaker 2: time writing this. I'd turned down so much work. I
Speaker 2: was like, there's no way this is going to go down.
Speaker 2: And I had a feeling that it wasn't going to
Speaker 2: come up again if we if we just let it
Speaker 2: sit there and gathered us right. So my producing partner
Speaker 2: Joe I was like, do we got to be resourceful.
Speaker 2: We got to find something outside of the box. And
Speaker 2: he knew someone that he'd met at a festival in
Speaker 2: Singapore who owns a studio in Indonesia and this tiny
Speaker 2: island called Badam, and you know, We're like, okay, how
Speaker 2: can we get there. We can create a bubble. He
Speaker 2: also owns this kind of golf course in a hotel,
Speaker 2: so we can create a bubble there and we can
Speaker 2: put all the crew there and we can do this.
Speaker 2: So we blagged to our financiers and they created this,
Speaker 2: you know, one hundred page document of COVID protocols and
Speaker 2: they're like, have you been to Indonesia and been to
Speaker 2: this place and scouted? I'm like, I've been there. I
Speaker 2: love it. It's incredible, complete lie complete lie will Yeah. Probably.
Speaker 2: But when we landed, I remember looking at the sunlight
Speaker 2: and I turned to Joe and go, God that the sunlight,
Speaker 2: the texture of the light is so different to India.
Speaker 2: I was like, dude, this is here we go And
Speaker 2: it was you know, whoever we could get our hands
Speaker 2: on locally. We just went at it ferociously. Take me
Speaker 2: to the brave Heart moment and that speech. Yes, So
Speaker 2: the brave Heart moment was it probably would have been
Speaker 2: a few weeks before principal photography when we were actually
Speaker 2: going to start shooting.
Speaker 1: You're in Indonesia.
Speaker 2: We're in Indonesia. Everything's going wrong. Literally, I think at
Speaker 2: one point we were running out of toilet paper. You know,
Speaker 2: they had the hotel catering, and you know, for a
Speaker 2: film crew, you can't have kind of room service like
Speaker 2: you know, coming two hours late to half an hour late.
Speaker 2: You know, you've got an entire crew that marches on
Speaker 2: their stomach. So I mean these locations that I was
Speaker 2: scouting for months to do these complex action sequences would
Speaker 2: turn up to shoot and the military with it, and
Speaker 2: they had been turned into red zones. The borders were closing.
Speaker 2: I broke my foot. One of the stunt men stamped
Speaker 2: on and broke a couple of toes. And they hadn't
Speaker 2: really accounted for the COVID protocols of actually having to
Speaker 2: pay to quarantine someone for two weeks before they could
Speaker 2: even do a day of shoot. So the final ancier
Speaker 2: calls me and He's like, look, I've never done this,
Speaker 2: but I'm shutting you down and you've got to come home.
Speaker 2: And I at least say it just like that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he said, I'm shutting you down and I was like,
Speaker 2: uh no, you're not. And he goes, what do you mean.
Speaker 2: I said, you can't do this. We have four hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty beating hearts on this island that have a
Speaker 2: purpose and this is going to be genre bending. You
Speaker 2: have to trust me that through this chaos, through this fire,
Speaker 2: we will forge a diamond. And I said, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to leave. I said, you're going to have to
Speaker 2: get someone to cuff my hands and drag me out
Speaker 2: of here. But did you get emotional on the speech?
Speaker 2: I was, I was really because I knew it was.
Speaker 2: It was slipping away and I won't mention any names,
Speaker 2: but they'd sent someone from the studio, this said individual
Speaker 2: you know, was intimidated by the you know, seeing a
Speaker 2: rat and a Islam or whatever. And I was like,
Speaker 2: how are we going to make this grimy, gritty vision
Speaker 2: of this underworld India? If you know, you can't show
Speaker 2: up to a location scout and you're moaning about craft
Speaker 2: services like you know, we've got to we've got to
Speaker 2: get as a New York goft. Yeah, but he goes, Okay,
Speaker 2: you know what, I'm going to give you forty eight hours.
Speaker 2: So Joe and I we went on a zoom call
Speaker 2: because at that time there was a COVID scare on
Speaker 2: the island too, so we couldn't mix with anyone. So
Speaker 2: we went on a seventeen hour zoom call. And it
Speaker 2: was with every hod I went on and D is
Speaker 2: a department Yeah sorry, yeah, and you know, even down
Speaker 2: to the makeup department. I sad, Okay, how many makeup
Speaker 2: brushes do you have? Thirty? Okay? Make it ten? Props?
Speaker 2: How many bicycles do we have? Twelve? Okay, we need three.
Speaker 2: I made some mistakes, you know, in terms of the
Speaker 2: breakaway tables that you know you throw the stuntman on.
Speaker 2: I think we only had three or four in the end.
Speaker 2: So we did these huge action sequences. Throw a bad
Speaker 2: guy onto a table and then you know, look as
Speaker 2: bad ass as I can, and then I'll shout cut
Speaker 2: and then we'd have to clue the balsa would back
Speaker 2: together again.
Speaker 1: You're on our sixteen of that call.
Speaker 2: Morale is what you know what I was very emotional
Speaker 2: on the call, and I said, look, it's up to
Speaker 2: each and every one of you to make some concessions.
Speaker 2: And you know, every head of department they feel like
Speaker 2: they're part of production is the most important part, which
Speaker 2: is incredible, you know, So it has to be like that.
Speaker 2: But I said, for the greater good of the picture,
Speaker 2: we need to find a way to be more resourceful.
Speaker 2: And the term I'd picked up when I was scouting
Speaker 2: in India was this word in the slums they used
Speaker 2: called jiguard, which is it kind of means resourcefulness, this
Speaker 2: kind of like clucky attitude, by any means necessary, you
Speaker 2: can be adaptive and resourceful. And I always use example
Speaker 2: of this guy I saw with this plastic bag that
Speaker 2: he twisted the four corners to make a hat. And
Speaker 2: you know, you can poke holes in it and make
Speaker 2: it a fishing net or cover the roof of your
Speaker 2: leaking tin roof. And that was the thing we went
Speaker 2: through and everyone responded. Everyone cut down. Some people cut salaries,
Speaker 2: even Mike Willowan, who's the man that owns a studio.
Speaker 2: I think he slashed the rate of the studio by
Speaker 2: over half to let us keep filming there. So I
Speaker 2: feel hugely grateful to my Indonesian crew.
Speaker 1: So your in production, you start filming, pretend I'm a
Speaker 1: medical examiner or like a concerned mother. You broke your
Speaker 1: hand on this film. You broke your toes on this film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you tore a shoulder on this film. Not quite, Jackie Chan,
Speaker 1: I mean, and you kept making this film.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What pain medication were you prescribed? And did you bring
Speaker 1: any for me today?
Speaker 2: Actually? I refuse to take painkillers stop, not even an anvil. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: because I had to be so hyper present the amount
Speaker 2: of adrenaline coursing through my veins for nine months.
Speaker 1: See, I'm imagining them giving you whatever they give Lebron
Speaker 1: in Game six of the NBA fight.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it was. It was coconut water, sweet potato,
Speaker 2: salmon and lettuce. That was it. Okay. I was a
Speaker 2: man possessed, I really was.
Speaker 1: And that was enough to make it through production even
Speaker 1: with all these injuries.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I mean when my hands snapped in the
Speaker 2: phone fight scene in this bathroom, I turned to Joe
Speaker 2: again in my DP and I go, I know it's broken.
Speaker 2: I heard it. I felt it. Every time I move,
Speaker 2: like there's this nerve sensation flicking in my ear, and
Speaker 2: I was like, let's just finish it, Let's just keep going.
Speaker 2: And we knew if we had to put a cast
Speaker 2: on my hand, that's it. We couldn't afford to v
Speaker 2: effects out this thing, and again the production was going
Speaker 2: to tank. So our assistant had found this cheap medical
Speaker 2: private jet to fly me to Jakarta. And you know,
Speaker 2: we needed to prove to insurance that we weren't going
Speaker 2: to break this COVID bubble. So we went on this jet.
Speaker 2: I went under. They put a screw in the Doctor's like,
Speaker 2: if you put more than a pound or two of
Speaker 2: pressure on this hand and you bend that tiny nail,
Speaker 2: it's going to be like pulling a nail out of wood.
Speaker 2: You will ruin the bone around it and you won't be.
Speaker 1: How do you not use your hand in an action film?
Speaker 2: Oh, we went straight back into the action. I started
Speaker 2: throwing myself out a window and bouncing off it straight after.
Speaker 2: And you see it in the film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw it. I see it in the Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's in the film.
Speaker 2: You know. The biggest heartbreaking thing is I so much
Speaker 2: better in the carrier when I had two hands. So
Speaker 2: what you see is me doing some of this stuff
Speaker 2: one handed, which slows you down the kind of like
Speaker 2: you know, nature of it. But I think you did
Speaker 2: a good job. Yeah.
Speaker 1: People love asking actors about their creative process, how they
Speaker 1: prepare for the role, how they become the character that
Speaker 1: they're playing. But you've always said that your acting process
Speaker 1: is quote ninety percent panic and ten percent it just happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I need that on a T shirt. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: we'll make them for you.
Speaker 1: It sounds like my sex life. No it doesn't, noted,
Speaker 1: glad we have it on record. When it comes to directing,
Speaker 1: what are those percentages looking like? Is it ninety percent
Speaker 1: panic and ten percent of just happens or is it
Speaker 1: something else?
Speaker 2: It was different this time, the amount of material that
Speaker 2: I've been accumulating and gathering. You know, every film I
Speaker 2: would watch, you know, I'm sitting with my friends, I'll
Speaker 2: drive them crazy. I'm like, oh we got we gotta
Speaker 2: rewind that. I got a film. That moment. I love
Speaker 2: the way the camera moves. Look at the lighting in
Speaker 2: that Oh wow. So watching a film with me for
Speaker 2: about the two years leading up to shoot was impossible.
Speaker 2: It was the most you know, drive people crazy. I
Speaker 2: prepped the shit out of this thing, every angle, every thought,
Speaker 2: and then you know, because of what was going on,
Speaker 2: we had to adapt. So it was having this plan
Speaker 2: and then being willing to just pivot. I'm not a
Speaker 2: very technical actor. I think I'm instinctual, and for me,
Speaker 2: that instinct really played a big key in making this.
Speaker 1: The instinctual part of your craft. I think we can
Speaker 1: chronicle that back to the beginning of your career, because
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six, you're sixteen years old. I
Speaker 1: think one day, on our way back home from work,
Speaker 1: your mother's sitting on a train just flipping to the
Speaker 1: local Metro newspaper and it's then that she stumbles upon
Speaker 1: the casting call for teenagers in London. Now again, you're sixteen,
Speaker 1: Like most teenagers don't love listening to their parents, and
Speaker 1: yet she talks you into auditioning. How did you do that?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I was just such a stubborn,
Speaker 2: little rascal of a teenager. I had terrible acne. You know,
Speaker 2: we were struggling at the time, and I just was like,
Speaker 2: you know, I really thought my parents were spiraling or something,
Speaker 2: struggling out just financially. You know, things weren't going well,
Speaker 2: and it was tough, and I was just like, this
Speaker 2: is insane. You know, I've never done any sort of
Speaker 2: professional acting or been to an acting school, and they're
Speaker 2: not going to cast any brown kids for sure. And
Speaker 2: we fought and we fought, and she's like, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to listen to you. We are going to bunk
Speaker 2: off school and we are going and she goes, you're
Speaker 2: going to wear your uniform so your dad doesn't know,
Speaker 2: and then we're going to take the train to the
Speaker 2: National Youth Theater and we queued up. I got a number.
Speaker 2: It was like American Idol. I went in and totally
Speaker 2: was the most over the top terrible audition I'd done.
Speaker 2: But I made them laugh and that was the beginning
Speaker 2: of everything. And we talk about it and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, you were so close to cracking and how
Speaker 2: drastically different my reality would have been. And she was
Speaker 2: close to cracking. Yeah, she was. She was close to
Speaker 2: listening to listening. I nearly you know, I nearly won,
Speaker 2: and trying to I was painting. You know how ridiculous
Speaker 2: this was to bunk and examine and go to the
Speaker 2: city and do this. You know, this newspaper, the metro
Speaker 2: newspapers on every seat on the train. It's so it's craziness.
Speaker 2: You get the part.
Speaker 1: It's on a show called Skins yep, where you play
Speaker 1: this wily sex craze British Pakistani teenager.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can we take a look at that? Oh boy for
Speaker 1: a second. Okay, all right, hope.
Speaker 2: No one has said eating breakfast at the same time
Speaker 2: as watching this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a warning and a disclaimer.
Speaker 2: But you had the drug std I don't have any.
Speaker 2: I thought you were beginner. No, you're going to put
Speaker 2: them in your turban. I don't wear a turbine. Chris
Speaker 2: thought you're going to get on a specially they look
Speaker 2: so disappointing when I'm not a terrorist. Well you're a
Speaker 2: very dull Muslim. Ah. Ow got it out, Chris. It
Speaker 2: was strict poker foxes want me to do?
Speaker 3: You weren't even playing u wang.
Speaker 2: Look it's posh kids. All the boys are gay. Yeah,
Speaker 2: how the girl's gay too? Oh boy, that's enough pain.
Speaker 2: That's enough pain. Oh boy? Wow? What do you think
Speaker 2: watching that? God? I was an awkward, awkward creature, wasn't
Speaker 2: I so hyperactive? And no, there's not a single bone
Speaker 2: of subtlety in that performance. You know, if you watch,
Speaker 2: I'm actually sometimes mouthing the other characters lines. Everyone. The
Speaker 2: ongoing joke was dev would wake up four hours before
Speaker 2: and I used to make up. I had some elaborate
Speaker 2: bathroom routine, but I was just so nervous and reading
Speaker 2: the lines over and over and over again. My first adr,
Speaker 2: like the additional sound recording. My mum came with me
Speaker 2: to that recording, and none of us knew what to
Speaker 2: expect because I've never done it before. And the first
Speaker 2: thing up was this sex scene.
Speaker 1: But you were a virgin.
Speaker 2: I was a virgin, and we had one computer in
Speaker 2: the house which my dad would do his accounting work on,
Speaker 2: so I couldn't, you know, do a lot of background research.
Speaker 2: So we had some James Bond tapes. So I watched
Speaker 2: some James Bond you know romance scenes, pull out some
Speaker 2: ice cubes and do all that kind of you know
Speaker 2: romance shit like every yeah, and then I'm on set
Speaker 2: and the directors like morchuawa, moruaha, and I think I
Speaker 2: was doing a scene where I was like humping away
Speaker 2: trying to recite Hugh Grant films to last, and my
Speaker 2: mom's in the watching me through the glass, and she
Speaker 2: turned to the men afterwards and she goes, he sounds
Speaker 2: just like his father. I was like the most, the most. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and we're trying to sell an action film here. I
Speaker 2: feel like this is not the right thing to be
Speaker 2: talking about it. But it happened. It happened.
Speaker 1: Well, no, I you know, I think it is because
Speaker 1: you explained how you made the song of your Yeah.
Speaker 1: But I think to fully understand the why, we have
Speaker 1: to know your story a bit, we don't have to
Speaker 1: keep talking about you having fixed sex. But you said
Speaker 1: want some to do the show. It felt like suicide
Speaker 1: in the community to put your kid into a TV
Speaker 1: show and let him drop out at sixteen. That first
Speaker 1: line is severe. I mean, what did that feel like?
Speaker 2: It was tough. I mean we had these, like you know,
Speaker 2: local community events for the kind of local Indian community,
Speaker 2: and we would show up and I remember when they
Speaker 2: when I told my mom I wanted to leave school
Speaker 2: because I didn't fit. It was it was very tough
Speaker 2: for me. Everyone was giving my mother dirty looks and
Speaker 2: taking her aside and like, how could you do this
Speaker 2: to your son? And you know, everyone's trying to backseat
Speaker 2: parent someone else's child in the community. Everyone has something
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 1: How did she handle that?
Speaker 2: It was very tough. She's a care for the elderly,
Speaker 2: and we weren't doing well financially, so we kind of
Speaker 2: became that kind of family for a moment where they're like,
Speaker 2: I'll look at those guys. You know, it's a bit
Speaker 2: of a train wreck going on there. And at the
Speaker 2: same time, I'd go to school and it was quite
Speaker 2: a more cultural school, and you know, you're naked on
Speaker 2: national television with your scrawny ass out and we didn't
Speaker 2: have kind of media training or protection. I was going
Speaker 2: to a school in the outskirts of London, and so
Speaker 2: I was getting a bit of flack for the being
Speaker 2: the butt of the jokes on the show. And there
Speaker 2: was all these chat rooms of like, you know, who's
Speaker 2: kiss Mary kill? You know, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: and I was always the one you would kill the
Speaker 2: worst in the show. And there were some members of
Speaker 2: my school that were not happy with the kind of
Speaker 2: Muslim representation of this guy being quite wild, and there
Speaker 2: were some that were. So it kind of was quite
Speaker 2: divisive in that sense. So it was a prickly place
Speaker 2: to be for a while how did you handle that?
Speaker 2: It was hard because I didn't even know what a
Speaker 2: boom mic was, you know, or what speed meant or rolling.
Speaker 2: The only word I'd been accustomed to watching movies was action. Literally,
Speaker 2: we went straight from being at home and being in
Speaker 2: school to on a film set and them calling action.
Speaker 2: It was as raw as you can get. And you know,
Speaker 2: for me, going to central London was a big deal.
Speaker 2: So to leave and stay in Bristol in this hotel
Speaker 2: with all these other teenagers that were more experienced at
Speaker 2: life than me, and you know, everyone's kind of drinking
Speaker 2: and a lot of shit was going down that I
Speaker 2: hadn't been exposed to, and I didn't quite know how
Speaker 2: to handle myself in that, and I was more caught
Speaker 2: up trying to be the funny guy to fit in
Speaker 2: then really focus on what was happening on set. So
Speaker 2: I remember looking back on that and it was only
Speaker 2: when I met Danny Boyle and actually there was actually
Speaker 2: a filmmaker on that, Adam Smith. I had one episode
Speaker 2: and he really saw me and spoke to me like
Speaker 2: an equal, not like a kid, and that really started
Speaker 2: to change. I started to get the idea of what acting.
Speaker 1: Was even if those kids in the chatroom didn't like
Speaker 1: your performance. There was one person that did, in Danny
Speaker 1: Boyle's daughter. Yeah, and she was the one that told
Speaker 1: him while he was casting a slum Dung millionaire to
Speaker 1: look at this young kid named Dev Patel when you
Speaker 1: met him for the first time. What did you think?
Speaker 2: I mean? It was we turned up to the audition again.
Speaker 2: I was with my mom and there was I was
Speaker 2: the I think I was the youngest to turn up
Speaker 2: and there was all these men with like beautiful designer stubble,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I'm not going to get this.
Speaker 2: And at that time the film was aged up. There
Speaker 2: wasn't the youngest kids, and that basically stealed the movie
Speaker 2: in slum Dog. So I went in and was doing
Speaker 2: the youngest part of the roles, you know, doing the
Speaker 2: pickpocketing scenes, and I knew I could be funny, so
Speaker 2: I had Danny in stitches. So I just went in
Speaker 2: there and I was like, let's go for it. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to be the handsome dude like these guys,
Speaker 2: but I'm going to go in there and make him laugh.
Speaker 2: And I did, and then he took me aside and
Speaker 2: he goes you know, to lead a movie, you have
Speaker 2: to be still, he goes. You know, to support a movie,
Speaker 2: you can come in and display attributes and add different
Speaker 2: elements to the equation. But to be a leading man,
Speaker 2: the audience needs to enter you through your eyes.
Speaker 1: Did you understand that?
Speaker 2: At the beginning, I was like, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: That's not acting like they need to see me do something.
Speaker 2: It took me a while to really grasp that. It
Speaker 2: was only when I was opposite an actor called the
Speaker 2: Irfan Khan, who you know sadly passed away, who's a
Speaker 2: true best Yeah, cinematic icon and Irfan we did a
Speaker 2: scene where he figures out why I'm on the show.
Speaker 2: I'm chained to this chair in this police interrogation room,
Speaker 2: and one of the other officers played by this actress
Speaker 2: sup Chuckla he kind of passes a leude remark about
Speaker 2: this girl, you know, calls something the bitch of the slum,
Speaker 2: and then I'm gonna go crazy and every fan's gonna
Speaker 2: grab me and go That's that's it. We find out
Speaker 2: why he's on it. Instead, as I'm wiling out, I'm
Speaker 2: expecting him to come and kind of like restrain me.
Speaker 2: Instead he just gets up and leaves the set. There
Speaker 2: was a little sink on the side of the room
Speaker 2: and he washes his face in the middle of the
Speaker 2: shot and comes and sits down with a towel. He
Speaker 2: pats his face down and then he goes, so that's
Speaker 2: why you're here. And I just was like, what the
Speaker 2: hell did he just do? And then Danny brought me
Speaker 2: behind the camera to watch him, and he has the
Speaker 2: most solf eyes and yeah, really recalibrate to me at
Speaker 2: that moment.
Speaker 1: In making this film, it was kind of your first
Speaker 1: or second time being in India? Is that right?
Speaker 2: Some dog some dog? Yeah, I would say it was
Speaker 2: my first time consciously content child. I went as a
Speaker 2: kid to a rural part for a wedding.
Speaker 1: As a seventeen year old making this movie with like
Speaker 1: his headphones and his Nike shoes. Yeah, not knowing what
Speaker 1: the hell you're seeing? How did you make sense of
Speaker 1: the community that you were part of and that you
Speaker 1: were now about to make work about.
Speaker 2: It was every kind of preconceived conception I had of
Speaker 2: the culture, you know, growing up in Rainer's Lane and
Speaker 2: trying to rid myself of that part of my identity
Speaker 2: to fit in and not be bullied in whatever they're
Speaker 2: not cool part, they're not cool part. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: I went there and the first thing I did was,
Speaker 2: you know, do a bunch of casting with I don't know,
Speaker 2: I must have been thirty of the most beautiful, captivating
Speaker 2: and interesting women I've ever seen or been exposed to
Speaker 2: in my you know existence at that point. And one
Speaker 2: after the other, this girl would come in and would
Speaker 2: do this scene together, torn jeans and girls with led
Speaker 2: Zeppelin T shirts on. And I didn't even know what
Speaker 2: that band was, you know. I was only listening to
Speaker 2: like Dizzy Rascal and like UK grime, and it really
Speaker 2: really recalibrated me in a huge way. I made some
Speaker 2: of my closest friends that I still have today on
Speaker 2: that experience, and I fell in love with it. It
Speaker 2: was intoxicating because it was so surprising in every way,
Speaker 2: and you can just get lost there. Did you feel
Speaker 2: enveloped in that community? So when I went out there,
Speaker 2: they found Freeda and then they went down for two
Speaker 2: weeks for Christmas before we started filming, and I just
Speaker 2: stayed back. I was actually hoping to just try and
Speaker 2: hang out with her because I had a huge crush
Speaker 2: on her, but she went off and wasn't around.
Speaker 1: So you're seventie and there by yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm there by myself. And I told Danny I
Speaker 2: want to just kind of feel the culture and let
Speaker 2: it kind of seep in. And I was very afraid,
Speaker 2: and I hadn't traveled alone before, but I had my
Speaker 2: padm which I was saving, so I put some in
Speaker 2: my pocket and I would walk the streets every day.
Speaker 2: And even though I looked like everyone, they could just
Speaker 2: they call them FREDUNGI, you know, like a foreigner. They
Speaker 2: just tell that I was a foreigner with the way
Speaker 2: I moved and just my cadence. And you know, it
Speaker 2: doesn't matter how chaotic India is and Mumbai is. Everyone
Speaker 2: has this kind of ease. No one's in a rush
Speaker 2: to go anywhere, and so they could just sense it.
Speaker 2: So it took a while for me to kind of
Speaker 2: like find that. And then you know, I spent all
Speaker 2: this time perfecting this accent, and then we shoot the movie,
Speaker 2: get done, and then a year later, Danny Bull's like,
Speaker 2: you know, the sound is not clear, We've got to
Speaker 2: redo it. And then I made him sound like a
Speaker 2: British dude from Rainer Lane it's my biggest regret. But no,
Speaker 2: it was. It took a while.
Speaker 1: You know, on the surface, it seems like that movie
Speaker 1: changed your life. I think it won like eight Academy Awards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the.
Speaker 1: Roles after did not come as you expected. Why do
Speaker 1: you think that is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to run the risk
Speaker 2: of sounding ungrateful, because you know, I think every guy
Speaker 2: with you know, even a tickle of brown pigment in
Speaker 2: their skin at audition for that thing. And so I
Speaker 2: was very fucking lucky to get it. But I knew
Speaker 2: straight away when we went to Toronto Film Festival, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm the lead in this movie. The audience totally flipped out.
Speaker 2: And as soon as we leave the first screening, the
Speaker 2: paparazzi are outside and they're screaming Freda, Freda, and she's,
Speaker 2: you know, this gorgeous, you know, ethereal being she's a star,
Speaker 2: and they kind of the security rushed her into this car,
Speaker 2: our car and it started to leave. It drove off,
Speaker 2: and I'm standing there with the paparazzi almost like well
Speaker 2: and then you know, you see that moment from the
Speaker 2: frenzy where they just start reviewing the photos and I'm
Speaker 2: almost like joining in, like oh yeah, that's a good one,
Speaker 2: and like no one gave a fuck about the slum
Speaker 2: Dog Millionaire dude. And I knew that you got yourself. No,
Speaker 2: no, no no. But like I say, I'm the slumdog, I'm
Speaker 2: the guy in the in the poster. I knew it
Speaker 2: was there wasn't going to be a lot of room
Speaker 2: for me unless it was the you know it dude
Speaker 2: or whatever. But also, you know, I wouldn't have had
Speaker 2: it any other way because I wasn't good enough as
Speaker 2: an actor already or deserving. I needed to earn some stripes.
Speaker 1: Putting a pause on the conversation for a second. When
Speaker 1: we come back, we discussed Dev's career post Slumdog Millionaire,
Speaker 1: his work in the film The Green Knight, working on
Speaker 1: the TV show The Newsroom with Aaron Sorkin, and a
Speaker 1: whole lot more stay with us. When you look back
Speaker 1: on that period after slum Dog Millionaire, when you look
Speaker 1: back at The Last Airbender and all that, which I
Speaker 1: know was a pretty tough shoot, what did that experience
Speaker 1: teach you about the kind of movies you wanted to
Speaker 1: make moving forward, that you maybe even wanted to direct
Speaker 1: one day.
Speaker 2: First of all, I needed a lot more training as
Speaker 2: an actor, and secondly, I should have listened to myself.
Speaker 2: You're a young kid and you all of a sudden
Speaker 2: get this agency, and you know, you have all these
Speaker 2: adults in suits telling you, you know, okay, this is
Speaker 2: how you're going to do it, and you're going to
Speaker 2: do this franchise. You're going to do it because there's
Speaker 2: other actor has just been pulled out, and you're you're
Speaker 2: going to go in and you're going to get this
Speaker 2: much money on the third one and blah blah blah,
Speaker 2: and we've got it mapped out and you're you're like, oh, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: And I kind of got coerced into this thing, which
Speaker 2: working with Danny Bull, You're you're you're feeling everything. You're
Speaker 2: in the trenches. It's a very different even in Skins,
Speaker 2: you know, it's very different type of filmmaking to what
Speaker 2: that process. It was too Hollywood for me, you know,
Speaker 2: what do you mean? Course I didn't consciously really make
Speaker 2: that decision to do it. I kind of just was like, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 2: I guess I have to do this. And I didn't fit.
Speaker 2: I wasn't right for the role, and I was atrocious
Speaker 2: in it. Every moment of it was so soul crushing
Speaker 2: in a way for me, and it showed in the film.
Speaker 2: And from that day onward, I was like, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't want to be this tiny cog in this
Speaker 2: huge McDonald's selling you know, your happy meal selling machine.
Speaker 2: I don't want to do that. No, no fucking way,
Speaker 2: never again.
Speaker 1: How do you move forward from that? It's one thing
Speaker 1: to read negative comments from angry, horny teenagers in a
Speaker 1: chat room. Yeah, but how do you move forward from
Speaker 1: that film?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Dude, the hardest acting is selling a movie you
Speaker 2: don't like. That's hard acting, and it's soul crushing looking
Speaker 2: someone in the whites of their eyes and trying to
Speaker 2: promote this thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I'm trying my best not to find myself in
Speaker 2: that position again. I how did I carry on? I just,
Speaker 2: you know, my same set of friends. You know, I'm lucky.
Speaker 2: I just got a few more goes. I got this
Speaker 2: Marigold Hotel movie and things like that, and then that
Speaker 2: started to things started to pick up slowly.
Speaker 1: It didn't deter you.
Speaker 2: It didn't deter me. But I thought I was done.
Speaker 1: But I've been lucky you get a role on the
Speaker 1: show in the newsroom. And the reason I kind of
Speaker 1: brought up that moment where you were low and felt
Speaker 1: bad was because when the show ended, Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: your cast mates reflected on the experience of making the program,
Speaker 1: and in an exit interview, when asked who was the
Speaker 1: most distracting energetic person on set, Boy, they had a
Speaker 1: sort of common answer, yeah, which I could read, But
Speaker 1: then I thought maybe you would want to read what
Speaker 1: they said.
Speaker 2: It was Sam Waterston. Wasn't he so hyperactive? That guy?
Speaker 2: Adina Porter? She goes Dev. That's why we can't have
Speaker 2: any nice things. P tell boy, that's so true, because
Speaker 2: you know, Jeff's doing these like massive twelve pages, you know,
Speaker 2: and we're in the bullpen behind him whilst he's in
Speaker 2: the newsroom. We got these phones and I figured out
Speaker 2: how to use the actual intercom system to talk to
Speaker 2: all the other actors, and I'm just breaking shit and
Speaker 2: I'm you know, it was anyway, Dev has the energy
Speaker 2: of seven people, while sometimes distracting, the Shenanigans were always
Speaker 2: funny and always welcome. Madison pill Allison, there you go.
Speaker 1: So even after all that pain that you've been talking
Speaker 1: about you somehow repurpose it into this energetic Wiley maybe
Speaker 1: adhds you keep saying performance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't know what I was saying half the time.
Speaker 2: In that show. All of it went over my head.
Speaker 2: I dropped out of school man at sixteen, so this
Speaker 2: stuff about, like, you know, I didn't know much about
Speaker 2: American politics, so I just learn it by rote going
Speaker 2: and I was just excited to be there and like
Speaker 2: pay my dues again. And you know, I remember he
Speaker 2: was just the it guy in the first read through.
Speaker 2: He didn't have a name. Then I just go to
Speaker 2: the read through. It it's Scott Ruden, it's Aaron Sorkin,
Speaker 2: and these actors and these thespians like you know, Thomas Sedowski.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, that guy's unbelievable. To watch him and set
Speaker 2: Allison Pearl, you know, like all of them, Jeff Sam,
Speaker 2: Emily Mortimer, and I remember Whence Jeff does that speech,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, why is America the greatest? And
Speaker 2: he's like, it's not, but it could be. I remember
Speaker 2: watching him in the read through and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I don't care if I'm the it guy. I'm going
Speaker 2: to sit and take note of these guys, So it
Speaker 2: was kind of that's why I did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a profoundly energetic performance and it is
Speaker 1: very far away from the thing that Danny Boyle told
Speaker 1: you you'll need one day, which is a stillness. Yes,
Speaker 1: was Lion the first time that you brought and delivered
Speaker 1: that stillness?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think I live in these kind of extremes,
Speaker 2: but there is a kind of old man in there
Speaker 2: too inside me that I like to think soulful. And
Speaker 2: the opportunity to be soulful came with Lyon and I
Speaker 2: read that script and I wasn't really their first choice
Speaker 2: at all because I was that Indian guy that's been
Speaker 2: in Slumdog, and I think filmmakers didn't want that baggage.
Speaker 2: They wanted to find a newer, fresher face.
Speaker 1: And Bangley ad you overexposed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, overexposed. You couldn't audition for life a pine. I
Speaker 2: couldn't know, you know, Everyone's like Dev's just the guy
Speaker 2: that's doing all the Indian stuff, and I was like, actually,
Speaker 2: I've kind of some Dog was like this amazing gilded
Speaker 2: cage where I like it'd becomes so huge that I
Speaker 2: kind of like was so overexposed. But couldn't do much
Speaker 2: else after and you know.
Speaker 1: It's amazing one death Betel is overexposed, but we somehow
Speaker 1: have room for like five famous chrises.
Speaker 2: I know, the math is just not mathing for me.
Speaker 2: It doesn't make any.
Speaker 3: Sense totally, and there's no offense to them and it's
Speaker 3: not about them. Yeah, it's an industry. It's an industry,
Speaker 3: an industry. And when Lyon came up, I had to
Speaker 3: auditions six times. Garth changed my life with that role.
Speaker 3: And the first scene, yeah, Garth Davis. The first scene
Speaker 3: we shot was the last scene of the film where
Speaker 3: I meet the mother, and I poured everything of myself
Speaker 3: into this. Just been through a breakup and I was
Speaker 3: unanchored in the world and ready to apply myself wholly
Speaker 3: to something that was.
Speaker 2: That was that film.
Speaker 1: You demonstrated what Danny wanted you to do, what he
Speaker 1: said you'll one day need to do in Lion. You
Speaker 1: then do it again in the film The Green Knight.
Speaker 1: I want to say with this one, because you're in
Speaker 1: your early thirties playing this character who desperately wants to
Speaker 1: be great, and yet the central question of the film is,
Speaker 1: but at what cost did you see yourself in that
Speaker 1: character and in that potentially fateful desire to be great.
Speaker 2: First of all, God do I love David Lowry again?
Speaker 2: Talk about soulful and like that script was. It was
Speaker 2: like music. It was so lyrical, and everyone that had
Speaker 2: been exposed to it had a different takeaway. But for me,
Speaker 2: it was, you know, on this journey of ambition and
Speaker 2: trying to stamp your mark in this story. It's about
Speaker 2: a young man trying to sit at a table of
Speaker 2: great men with great stories, and he needs to create
Speaker 2: a story of his own. And there's a beautiful line
Speaker 2: in it, which is, you know, instead of striving for greatness,
Speaker 2: why not strive for goodness instead? And that really struck
Speaker 2: me because you know, I've met a lot of people
Speaker 2: and seen a lot of people change throughout this time,
Speaker 2: and it's all consuming this game, and you know, I
Speaker 2: get to see people in the wings, I get to
Speaker 2: see them turn on their crocodile smiles and we do
Speaker 2: a big Q and a panel or whatever, and then
Speaker 2: you get to see them what they're like to their assistance,
Speaker 2: or what they're like in the makeup trailer or and
Speaker 2: you know, everyone has a bad day. You know, it's
Speaker 2: a very pressurized position to be in. But for me,
Speaker 2: it's like it is tough. It's a tough industry. And
Speaker 2: I remember the press tour for Lion and how beautiful
Speaker 2: making the movie was. Garth took us out into nature
Speaker 2: and made us find the leaf that matched our soul,
Speaker 2: and we listened to music and we didn't do rehearsals.
Speaker 2: We did bonding exercises and earthing and grounding and it
Speaker 2: changed me as a human. And then you go and
Speaker 2: do what they call a press campaign. I mean, you're
Speaker 2: campaigning for yourself to be nominated for an award. What
Speaker 2: an amazing position to be in. But also you know,
Speaker 2: you're talking about yourself for months and months on end,
Speaker 2: and you know you're it's the complete opposite of what
Speaker 2: making the film was. Yeah, you're hitting the same taglines
Speaker 2: over and over again, and you're kind of selling yourself.
Speaker 2: It was a lot. Let's say this is a cliche,
Speaker 2: but at the top of my career, which I consider that,
Speaker 2: you know, being nominated for an Oscar, I felt inside
Speaker 2: the most turbulent, the most lonely. And what does that
Speaker 2: feel like? I mean, you're at these soires, these events
Speaker 2: with you know, the magnificent, most magnificent, incredible talent in
Speaker 2: individuals that look like gods, and to me, they're worthy
Speaker 2: of being there. I've watched them on screen and they
Speaker 2: fit and I feel like a fraud.
Speaker 1: You didn't think you were worthy?
Speaker 2: No, even then, I didn't feel worthy, and now I
Speaker 2: don't know if I ever will. Unfortunately, I think that's
Speaker 2: an issue I'm trying to deal with. But it also
Speaker 2: probably is what is the furnace within me? Indian parents?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 1: But is there anyone more proud?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Both my parents have been incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but when you say your parents, man, what does
Speaker 1: that actually mean?
Speaker 2: You know? You know, I just think it was the
Speaker 2: first time you've avoided No, no, no, no. I was thinking
Speaker 2: about it. I was like, you know, because my mom
Speaker 2: doesn't know. I remember when I got nominated. She goes,
Speaker 2: one day, maybe you'll get nominated for the real one.
Speaker 2: I go, what's the real one? She goes the leading one,
Speaker 2: and I was like, oh mom, oh my lord. I
Speaker 2: had to sit down and explain. But uh yeah, oh
Speaker 2: that's therapy.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that will do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But she was proud as punch coming. She was my
Speaker 2: date to the ceremony, and that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1: The line was, you're striving for greatness, but why not goodness?
Speaker 1: You said once, ambition is beautiful, but you have to
Speaker 1: remember what you're doing it for. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: this conversation, we were talking about that ambition, your desire
Speaker 1: to make this movie, the links you and your crew
Speaker 1: were willing to go to to make this movie. Now
Speaker 1: that you've made it, do you have a better idea
Speaker 1: of who or what you were doing it for.
Speaker 2: I think I was doing it for little Dev Young
Speaker 2: Dev who you know, Acnie Deev. No, yeah, Acne Deev.
Speaker 2: I was thinking if Acne Dev Biggid fresh Prince of
Speaker 2: bele a haircut Dev I really I My gateway into
Speaker 2: cinema was watching Bruce Lee, you know, a guy that
Speaker 2: had similar skin cut to me in dark hair and
Speaker 2: n the Dragon. Yeah, Into the Dragon Man changed my
Speaker 2: life and I wanted to be expressed in the genre.
Speaker 2: I wanted to exist in the genre. I want people
Speaker 2: like me to exist. After south By, you know this,
Speaker 2: This Indian man came up to me and he goes,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm jealous of my fourteen year old son, and
Speaker 2: I was like, it's a really weird thing to open
Speaker 2: a conversation with and he was holding my hand and
Speaker 2: shaking him wuldn't let it go? And I go, what
Speaker 2: do you mean? And he's like, it's the first time
Speaker 2: he's got someone on screen in a film like this
Speaker 2: that looks like him to look up to. And he goes,
Speaker 2: I'm so proud of you and keep it up, and
Speaker 2: I again was like, I don't know. Maybe it was
Speaker 2: my hormones that day, but it was. I'm not the
Speaker 2: best with compliments, but that one, that one caught me
Speaker 2: off guard and it meant the world because that was
Speaker 2: the objective of it.
Speaker 1: Making this film was hard. The pre production was hard,
Speaker 1: The production was hard. The post production, yeah, sounds like
Speaker 1: it was hard. Yeah, I want to know when you're
Speaker 1: struggling in post production, what did Jordan Peel see that
Speaker 1: others could not.
Speaker 2: We got on. Our first conversation was almost three hours long,
Speaker 2: and he understood what I was going for, which is
Speaker 2: to use genre as a trojan horse to talk about
Speaker 2: more stuff. I didn't want to just do a film
Speaker 2: that I just had a barrage of punches and kicks
Speaker 2: that kind of wash over you like a video game.
Speaker 2: I wanted the emotional punches, the political punches, the kicks
Speaker 2: to mean something too and kind of wrap it in
Speaker 2: this kind of film that will act. You know, people
Speaker 2: will access if you want to talk about, you know,
Speaker 2: violence against women, you know about the cast system against
Speaker 2: you know, religion. Basically, it's a revenge about faith. He
Speaker 2: got all of those things as a guy you know
Speaker 2: who does that incredibly well, you know, with his films.
Speaker 2: I think he saw that and at the same time,
Speaker 2: you know, he saw he's someone that's kind of was
Speaker 2: able to step out of a kind of box that
Speaker 2: he was put in and reinvent himself, you know. And
Speaker 2: there's a line in the in Monkey Man, this character
Speaker 2: Alpha tells me, he goes, you know, you need to
Speaker 2: destroy in order to grow, to create space for new life.
Speaker 2: I was reading about, you know, the Aboriginals in Australia
Speaker 2: and controlled burnings in order to nourish the soil to
Speaker 2: create new life, and I just thought, what an incredible
Speaker 2: philosophy is that, you know, I had to destroy myself,
Speaker 2: my old avatar of myself, destroy everything, and I wanted
Speaker 2: to destroy the image the audience had of me or
Speaker 2: all of those even the guys that we'd hired that
Speaker 2: we fired because they overlooked me as just this you know, Oh,
Speaker 2: he's just this silly actor. He's this is going to crumble.
Speaker 2: We were in Indonesia and they're not helping. I wanted
Speaker 2: to prove them all wrong. I wanted to destroy that perception.
Speaker 2: And did you. I mean, the last song in the
Speaker 2: movie is called Grow by Fa Sol and that's me
Speaker 2: hopefully growing and showing you know, this is a new chapter.
Speaker 1: I hope your father is fond of quoting a philosopher tag.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, my dad doesn't quote a lot, by the way,
Speaker 2: he doesn't talk a lot at all. So when he
Speaker 2: dropped those lyrics, I was like, Dad, the lyric was.
Speaker 1: I've spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while
Speaker 1: the song I came to sing remains unsung. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: does that mean to you? Now?
Speaker 2: I couldn't let it go because of the film. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I had. I had actually walked off it
Speaker 2: when our financier went bankrupt and they kind of took
Speaker 2: the film over and we're doing a bad job with
Speaker 2: all the sound and the color and the v effects.
Speaker 2: So I'd left it because I couldn't endorse it. And
Speaker 2: then you know, we had such a short time with
Speaker 2: Universal to kind of make it mine again and undo
Speaker 2: all of the kind of stuff that you know, some
Speaker 2: random third party had done to the movie. But you know,
Speaker 2: there was many times when I was writing this long
Speaker 2: text on my phone to apologize to my cast and
Speaker 2: crew for letting them down, and I never sent it,
Speaker 2: thank god. But I'm you know, at one point I
Speaker 2: told my dad I can't endorse this. I can't be
Speaker 2: like in this movie. He's a performing monkey for a crowd.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be that performing monkey for something
Speaker 2: I've worked so hard on if it's not going to
Speaker 2: be what I want it to be. And he goes,
Speaker 2: he told me this quote, and he goes, I'm with you, son,
Speaker 2: but remember this, And I was like, fuck, I got
Speaker 2: I gotta sing this song because, like I said, young
Speaker 2: dev you know he would want to see it. People
Speaker 2: like me will want to see this and feel it.
Speaker 1: So Yeah, there's a line in the movie I think
Speaker 1: the pain will leave you once it's finished teaching you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what has it taught and has it left?
Speaker 2: The pain hasn't left, But what it taught me is
Speaker 2: to never take no for an answer. I really found
Speaker 2: this next level possessed level of belief in this thing,
Speaker 2: and I've never had that before. And you know, that's
Speaker 2: what it's taught me, is to believe in myself a
Speaker 2: bit more.
Speaker 1: Last question, now that you have this new belief in yourself.
Speaker 2: Kind of confident. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: The one that the awkward teenager with acne did not have.
Speaker 1: The one that went to India for the first time
Speaker 1: and discovered a new life, a new community that he'd
Speaker 1: always been sort of looking for. The one that had
Speaker 1: trouble on an m Night. Shyamalan movie rebounded in these films,
Speaker 1: was deeply, profoundly energetic on the Newsroom, the one that
Speaker 1: made it Lion Possible, the Green Knight Possible. What do
Speaker 1: you want for yourself moving forward?
Speaker 2: I'm learning I'm trying to be kind to myself, but
Speaker 2: that's what I'm trying to do. But what I want
Speaker 2: for myself is, I guess I want to keep making stuff.
Speaker 2: I know what rarefied to says, I am to be
Speaker 2: able to greenlight a movie and make a movie and
Speaker 2: even get any form of financing behind that thing. So
Speaker 2: you know, I feel the responsibility and I want to
Speaker 2: keep telling stories. That's what I want for myself dive
Speaker 2: back into the fire.
Speaker 1: And to that kid whose father is jealous that he
Speaker 1: gets this movie, you say, what.
Speaker 2: What do I say? I say, well, you know this
Speaker 2: movie is about someone of that scard, right, he has
Speaker 2: physical and emotional scars, and those those scars, I hope
Speaker 2: other characters and people around them, and what they do
Speaker 2: in this movie is they they they don't. They're not
Speaker 2: signs of trauma. They're actually signs of triumphers. They're signs
Speaker 2: of someone overcoming something. There. You know, a scar is
Speaker 2: a sign of a warrior. You came over something. That's
Speaker 2: what the motto of this film is. So what I
Speaker 2: would say is, you know, for every time you've been
Speaker 2: knocked down or bruised or emotionally or whatever, we should
Speaker 2: play Ama. No, but yeah, keep going, man, keep going.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I can clear the rights for that. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 2: keep on trucking. Get back up, Yeah, get back up.
Speaker 2: Death Betel, this was amazing. I appreciate you. Thank you
Speaker 2: for that. I felt like therapy.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna charge you, don't worry. Congratulations on the film.
Speaker 1: We've gone through all these sort of chapters of yours
Speaker 1: and I'm so glad that you made it through to
Speaker 1: the other side, and I so look forward to saying
Speaker 1: what you make next.
Speaker 2: Thank you man, good luck. Thanks, that was amazing, You're amazing,
Speaker 2: incredible man, what.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, and that's our show. If you enjoyed
Speaker 1: today's episode with dev the best thing you can do
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Speaker 1: you can do so at SF at talk easypond dot com.
Speaker 1: That's sf at talk easypod dot com. You can send
Speaker 1: us ideas for future episodes, reflections on the episodes you
Speaker 1: have heard, or if you just want to say hello,
Speaker 1: drop us a line at SF at talk easypod dot com.
Speaker 1: We are in the process of doing a special new
Speaker 1: project in collaboration with our listeners, so if you want
Speaker 1: to be part of that, drop us a line at
Speaker 1: that email address. I want to give us special thanks
Speaker 1: this week to the teams at Shelter PR and Universal
Speaker 1: and of course our guest today, Dev Patel. Be sure
Speaker 1: to check out his new film Monkey Man, exclusively in
Speaker 1: theaters around the country. To learn more about Dev and
Speaker 1: his work, visit our show notes at talk easypod dot com.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear other conversations with actors and directors,
Speaker 1: I'd recommend our talks with Cate Blanchette, oscar Isaac Ethan Hawk,
Speaker 1: Tom Hanks, and Lily Gladstone. To hear those and more.
Speaker 1: Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you
Speaker 1: like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: Instagram at talk Easypod. If you want to purchase one
Speaker 1: of our mugs or our vinyl record with the inimitable
Speaker 1: fran Liebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot
Speaker 1: com slash shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by
Speaker 1: Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jennickson Bravo. Today Talk
Speaker 1: was edited by Clarice Gavara and mixed by Andrew Vastola.
Speaker 1: It was engineered by Stephen Toll at Citybox out of
Speaker 1: New York City.
Speaker 2: Our music is.
Speaker 1: By Dylan Pack. Our illustrations are by Christia Schanoy. Our
Speaker 1: graphics are by Ethan Seneca. Today's photographs were by Kyle Manning.
Speaker 1: Our research comes from Sharia Aron k. I also want
Speaker 1: to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Kerry Brody,
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Tara Machado,
Speaker 1: Sarah Nix, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Cohen, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm
Speaker 1: San Fragoso. Thank you for listening to another episode of
Speaker 1: Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with
Speaker 1: a new talk. Until then, stay safe and so on.