"I am trying to break the mould," Dev Patel wails. The star of Slumdog Millionaire is in Hollywood, complaining that there is still a prejudice towards India that is magnified in Tinseltown.
Asian actors, he says, are seldom written into scripts except as taxi drivers or shopkeepers: "Even when I first arrived in America everyone thought I was from a slum in India. They found it weird that I had an English accent."
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Ironically, given that he's one of a tiny handful of Asian actors getting decent roles outside Bollywood, he had only been to India once before Slumdog catapulted him to fame. Originally from Harrow, north London, he was dragged to a wedding in Gujarat, aged 10. His few recollections include being "bitten by mosquitos" and "getting the runs". He recalls: "I just couldn't make sense of it back then. I was a young kid and couldn't understand such a weird country."
Then in 2008, Danny Boyle cast him as Jamal Malik and unlocked the country for him in a way his parents never could. "The India I witnessed through Danny was the India of gangsters and black money. It gave it an identity that I am still forging in my acting identity today."
Nevertheless, Patel feels ambivalent about his good fortune: "As an Asian guy in the film world, you automatically get pigeonholed. I noticed that even before I got here. Without stepping into a room, you could already hear people thinking: 'he can be that guy who runs that shop or drives that taxi'. And that was a real hindrance. But after a while I began to realise that I couldn't keep turning down roles. I had to conform to what Hollywood was giving me and then break that boundary from within the role."
<font color="#333333" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, serif" size="2"></font>Does he go along with the prevalent opinion - that he's punching above his weight with the seriously beautiful Pinto?
"I used to hate that," he concedes, before putting on a mock-outraged tone. "She's beautiful - but what about my personality! What about what I bring? She's lucky to have me! But now my attitude has changed. If I saw this beautiful woman with a dude who looks as unfortunate as I do, the first thing that would come to my mind would be: 'You lucky bas***d'."
Ufff Yeh Love Hai Mushkil
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