Dev Patel (Gujuarati, born April 1990) is a British film and television actor as well as a martial artist. As an actor, he is known for his performances as Anwar Kharral in the teen drama series Skins and as main protagonist Jamal Malik in Danny Boyle’s critically acclaimed and multiple Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which Patel won a number of awards, including a Critics’ Choice Award and Screen Actors Guild Award, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
As a martial artist, he is a black belt in Taekwondo and was a bronze medallist at the 2004 AIMAA World Championships in Dublin.
Dev Patel was born in Harrow, England, to Hindu Gujarati Indian parents, both of whom were born in Nairobi, Kenya. Patel grew up in Rayners Lane, Harrow, and attended Longfield Primary School. He had his first acting role as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the school’s production of Twelfth Night.
His drama teacher Niamh Wright has stated: “Dev was a gifted student who quickly impressed me with his innate ability to communicate a wide variety of characters imaginatively and creatively. He was awarded full marks for his GCSE performance to a live audience and the visiting examiner was moved to tears by his honest portrayal of a child in the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia.
Patel said that as a kid, he was “bloody energetic” and used to get in trouble at school because of it. His mother got him into martial arts as a way to channel his energy.
Patel began his acting career in late 2006, when he auditioned for the E4 teen drama television series Skins. Patel’s mother saw the casting ad in a newspaper and took him to the audition even though he had a science exam the next day.
Patel made his feature film debut when he was cast in the role of Jamal Malik, the central character in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire. The character Jamal Malik is an Indian Muslim boy born and raised in the poverty of Mumbai, India. Boyle considered hundreds of young male actors, but found that Bollywood leads were generally “strong, handsome hero-types”, not the personality he was looking for. Boyle’s 17-year-old daughter Caitlin pointed him to the British television ensemble drama Skins, of which Patel was a cast member.
Fri, May 29, 2009
TV & Film