Bender agenda follows Oscars (From The Northern Echo)

Bender agenda follows Oscars

12:01pm Thursday 12th August 2010 in

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Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel says he’s quite happy to accept a few brickbats for The Last Airbender. Steve Pratt reports.

DEV Patel has had the sort of rise to stardom that most would-be actors can only dream of.

His first acting experience was in a TV series which became a cult hit, his second was starring in a movie that won eight Oscars. So the pressure must be greater for Dev Patel than many others competing in the highlycompetitive and over-crowded business of acting.

The actor from Skins who helped Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire movie to global success as its leading man has done his best to remain level-headed about fame.

“It’s tricky because I’m not expecting another script like Slumdog or a character like him to come round… or the film to win eight Oscar every day,” he says.

“I’ve accepted that. What you do as a young actor is try and sink your teeth into as many different roles as possible.

“So, going from doing a TV show (Skins) where I played a very comedic character that was sort of a humping chihuahua on acid, to going out to India and playing Jamal Malik, a boy struggling to survive in the slums and reunite with his soul-mate, and then coming to this…”

This is The Last Airbender, a live action adventure based on the hit animated series. A number of things enticed him to the movie, not least playing a royal (Prince Zuko, one of the baddies) and that the film’s written and directed by M Night Shyamalan, who made The Sixth Sense and Signs.

Patel says: “What you try and do is just come to it as a fresh slate and just act. I came into this industry as an actor and that’s what I want to do … try and put myself in as many different shoes and as many different characters as possible.

“So I’m not looking to top Slumdog. I’m proud of it, I worked hard on it so if people say that it isn’t a good performance then thank you very much, and I’ll just keep on trying to do more.

“I can’t deny there isn’t a pressure when everyone’s expecting you to do that. But they’re two totally different roles. Hopefully, with The Last Airbender I’m trying to tap into a different audience as well.”

It’s all certainly happened very quickly for the 20-yearold from Harrow, outside London. He won the role in Skins at an open casting call of hundreds to play Anwar.

For The Last Airbender, he had an advantage over other contenders for the role of Zuko the fighting prince – he’s a black belt in taekwondo and a bronze medallist at the 2004 world championships.

“When I was a young kid I had a bit too much energy. I needed to channel that and my mum put me into martial arts training,” he says.

“I was more than rusty going into the film, but the stunt co-ordinators Ben and Marco were great in incorporating our own talents within their vision of what our characters should be. So I got to add a few of my own kicks into the film and also incorporate the character’s fighting style, which was Northern Shaolin.”

Throughout the Slumdog Millionaire experience he was telling himself repeatedly “It’s a blessing”. He can’t say it was a dream come true to have that sort of success with his first film – it was beyond that.

“I didn’t even expect Slumdog to do that well and it did,” he explains.

“It was one of the biggest confidence boosts for me that Danny Boyle believed in me and put the film in my hands.

The second one was that the film did so well. That was amazing.

“It’s crazy. There’s lots of things I’ve had to become accustomed to really quickly, such as the whole paparazzi and things like that. But in general, the people that do meet me are very nice, they’re well-wishers.”

But then there are the rumours about his relationship with his Slumdog co-star Indian former model Frieda Pinto. They’ve been photographed together away from the movie set, with rumours of an engagement circulating. He’s not about to give anything away, but does talk about the effect on him and his family.

“What’s hard is the domino effect it has on your family. So getting pictured coming out of somewhere or something like that, and the sort of rumours that are spread about you, I can deal with.”

“But my parents having to go to work and explain it to a million people that, ‘no, my son’s not engaged, he hasn’t flown his wedding cake across the world’ or something like that.

“But it’s something that’s made the whole family a bit stronger in a weird way, I guess.”