Dev Patel: ​‘Dick­ens’ sto­ries are always going to be relevant’

To an audi­ence of a cer­tain age, Dev Patel is best known as Anwar, the sex-obsessed teenag­er from Chan­nel 4’s 2007 com­e­dy-dra­ma series, Skins. In the 12 years since, he’s carved out an impres­sive career in film, ris­ing to inter­na­tion­al acclaim with lead roles in Dan­ny Boyle’s Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire and Garth Davis’ Lion.

He was Arman­do Iannucci’s first choice for the lead in his pas­sion project adap­ta­tion of Charles Dick­ens’ ​‘David Cop­per­field’, and with good rea­son. Patel deliv­ers a fine turn as the per­pet­u­al­ly earnest young man about town strug­gling to find his way in the world – though at first he thought it was a rather dif­fer­ent story…

LWLies: What was your knowl­edge of the source mate­r­i­al before you came on board?

Patel: I was the guy that thought this was going to be about David Cop­per­field the illu­sion­ist. My agents sent me an email say­ing ​‘Do you want to meet Arman­do Ian­nuc­ci? He’s mak­ing a movie about David Cop­per­field and he wants you to play David.’ I was like, ​‘Wow, that’s so cool – is he sure?’ I thought, ​‘Well, I kind of do look like David if I cut my hair – I’ve got the long face and a black t‑shirt,’ so kind of went down that route. I even got my accep­tance speech ready. [Laughs] Big mistake.

So once you’d realised it was Dick­ens’ Cop­per­field, rather than the magi­cian, what was it about the sto­ry that res­onat­ed with you?

I read the script and I was like… god, it’s me. It sounds like me. It’s this awk­ward indi­vid­ual try­ing to come to terms with his iden­ti­ty and fit in, and he feels like a fish out of water. The sto­ry is so much about embrac­ing your her­itage and where you’re from, and how that can be your strength. For so much of the film, David shuns where he came from, and he’s afraid of peo­ple find­ing out. But when he embraces his sto­ry and his strug­gle, that’s when he starts to find suc­cess and this sense of humility.

Do you feel the pol­i­tics of ​‘David Cop­per­field’ are still rel­e­vant to con­tem­po­rary society?

Yeah, I mean, things haven’t changed. We still need these sto­ries of togeth­er­ness and of the under­dogs – the mass­es, you could say – stick­ing togeth­er. Dick­ens’ uni­verse shows the rich and the pow­er­ful abus­ing their priv­i­lege over the major­i­ty, much like some politi­cians. There are these sto­ries in soci­ety and it’s always going to be rel­e­vant, unfor­tu­nate­ly. I was mak­ing a film in India while I was read­ing the Cop­per­field script, and that’s a land of Dick­ens too. You see the same class struggle.

It feels like you play under­dog char­ac­ters with quite a lot of obsta­cles to over­come in a lot of your films.

I guess. Isn’t that every hero jour­ney in a movie? Even in some­thing like The Wolf of Wall Street, some­one who’s real­ly obnox­ious, in a way he starts off as an under­dog. I don’t feel like an under­dog, but I feel like an imposter a lot of the time. I can relate to the gen­er­al awkwardness.

Do you think it’s also because you didn’t come up through the sys­tem of stage school and pro­fes­sion­al train­ing, like a lot of actors?

Com­plete­ly. I felt that in the rehearsals for David Cop­per­field all the time, watch­ing these amaz­ing actors com­ing in one by one for these intense work­shops. They were all so impres­sive and I was think­ing, ​‘Oh god, what am I doing head­lin­ing this thing? They’re gonna find out I’m a fraud. This is it, this is it for me.’ But it was quite the con­trary – it was just like in the film.

It’s the peo­ple around David that give him strength, as well as the sto­ries he writes. That was the case with this. I remem­ber some­thing Peter Capal­di did quite ear­ly on in the rehearsal process. I was sit­ting there in a kind of drained pan­ic, with so much anx­i­ety about wreck­ing this whole film, and he took me out­side and we had this beau­ti­ful chat. He said, ​‘Arman­do is my friend, but I’m doing this because you’re in it. Just open your heart and go with it.’ He’s got such a gen­er­ous spirit.

What sort of films did you grow up watching?

I grew up on a diet of Jim Car­rey, Rowan Atkin­son, Schwarzeneg­ger and Bruce Lee. Very pro­tein-heavy I would say. But right now I’m going through this Kore­an cin­e­ma phase. I actu­al­ly changed my flight at the Toron­to Film Fes­ti­val so I could watch Par­a­site. That’s how much I love Bong Joon-ho. I met him in the lob­by of a hotel and I ran up and did that fan­boy thing of just scream­ing his IMDb cred­its at him. I was like, ​‘Oh my god, Mem­o­ries of Mur­der! The Host! That was real­ly good – Moth­er, that was fan­tas­tic too!’ And he was like, ​‘Okay, okay, I did that, yes I did that.’

You’re work­ing on your own direc­to­r­i­al debut now. What have you learnt from your expe­ri­ences work­ing with film­mak­ers like Dan­ny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom?

The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that they’re all just real­ly bold. And they’re all still curi­ous. That’s what I’ve tak­en from them all. I’ve just fin­ished film­ing with David Low­ery; we were in Ire­land up a moun­tain just get­ting bat­tered by the rain, then I was in a water tank for the whole day. These guys cre­ate their own amaz­ing uni­vers­es and it’s that toe­ing the line between some­thing that’s so bizarre it could fail or it’ll be total­ly ground­break­ing. They are all risk-tak­ers, who march to the beat of their own drum. Some­times I get rid­dled with so much doubt and think I’m not good enough, so it’s not let­ting that stop me. Look­ing for that adren­a­line rush.

The Per­son­al His­to­ry of David Cop­per­field is released 24 Jan­u­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.