Dev Patel Interview

The only thing crazier than an impoverished character winning the equivalent of $500,000 on a quasi-mythical quiz show half way around the world is the young chap who miraculously landed the role to begin with.

Okay, it may not be so much of a miracle, but Dev Patel is about as star-struck as any 18-year-old can be, sitting a few feet away from Danny Boyle in an expensive hotel room in Beverly Hills.

It was not too long ago that Patel was sitting across a table from Boyle discussing the lead role of Slumdog Millionaire.

Fresh off a scouting trip in India, Boyle returned to England frustrated at his inability to select the male lead for his upcoming project.

Fearing he would not be able to go forward with his project featuring a cast exclusively hand-picked in Mumbai, Boyle found solace in his young daughter. “Danny was having a hard time casting the lead role in India because all the guys are butch,” Patel explained to Buzzine, pointing out male talent in India are über-image conscious. “They need to take their tops off and walk around all buff,” he said, squinting his eyes and pressing his lips together as he mocked a bicep flex. “Obviously, that’s not me.”

Patel, who plays lead character Jamal, went on to explain how Boyle’s daughter was watching the British show Skins when her father returned from a round of casting in India. When Boyle told his young child he could not find a male lead, she sheepishly pointed to Patel’s character on the tube.

The humbled director nodded his head and urged a casting agent to inform Patel he was interested in having him come in for an audition.

When invited to his first-ever audition, Patel remembers taking his mother with him –- “because she is my lucky charm.”

“There were all these good-looking dudes with designer clothing,” he said. “I was sitting there and said, ‘Shit, mom, this isn’t going to be good.’”

Moments later, when he met Boyle at the audition, Patel instantly connected with the famed British director. “He has passion for what he does. He just engages you when he talks to you.”

Even more engaging, though, was the script. “Before I went for the first audition, I got a small snippet of the script,” Patel candidly told Buzzine. “There was a scene that is no longer in the movie where my character is telling his brother about destiny and she’s my soul mate and how we were meant to be together. I thought, what the hell? This guy is 17,” he exclaimed. “I looked to my sister and asked her, is this normal? Because I like computer games!”

Joking aside, Patel parroted Boyle’s words in an earlier interview with Buzzine, stating he was lost after reading the script’s first few pages. “After the first 20 pages, I was like, whoa!” he emphatically said. “It’s so endearing, you just want to root for this guy. I was immediately drawn to his innocence. That’s what I can do. Bring that (innocence) to him.”

To help deliver that innocence, Patel had to travel to India. In what he said was just his second trip to his motherland, Patel was irked when he was informed by the production crew he had to visit Mumbai’s slums to get into character. “Coming from London, I had this stupid, preconceived notion and stereotype of what a slum would be like,” Patel recalled, saying he expected to see malnourished children with near empty bowls of food. “When I woke up that morning to go with the location scout, I thought it was going to be a bloody hard day. I was so glad to be proved wrong when I was there. It totally shaped my character.”

Playing the role of Jamal, Patel was able to perform two tasks at once -– underdog and educator.

A trademark of Jamal is his innocence and perseverance. “This boy is innocent,” Patel recalled. “He lives in a dog-eat-dog environment and it’s survival of the fittest every single day, but he’s got this integrity to him.”

Jamal’s integrity was on full display during the present-day quiz show and interrogation scenes, when Patel acted side-by-side with Bollywood legends Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan. “He takes all this shit from the game show host and is ripped to shreds before a live audience and the whole of India,” Patel said of Jamal. “He is even tortured, but he doesn’t give up.”

Yet playing Jamal provided Patel the opportunity to shed some light about the reality of Mumbai’s slums. “When you are there, you are overcome by this sense of community,” he humbly told Buzzine. “Everyone knows everyone and they are all working together in unison. They don’t pity themselves.”

One person who does not feel any pity is Patel, who never really watched the quiz show of which Slumdog Millionaire is based upon. “I didn’t really watch the show all that much when it was on,” he said of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. “It’s not my thing really, because I am bad at general knowledge. I am one of those guys who would go after the first question, narrow it down to 50/50, and still get it wrong.”

Even though he never really cared for the game show, he did want to make an impression upon Boyle and, in turn, his audience. “When I got picked for this film, it was totally different,” Patel said, comparing this role to his work on Skins, where he plays a young chap whose only care in life is sexual intercourse. “I knew I could do something with my acting other than Skins, and this was my opportunity. I’m just an average Joe with a big dream.”

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire is now playing in limited release in Los Angeles and New York, and is expected to be in wide release in early 2009.