Tapping into his inner alpha

hollywood diaries

Dev Patel wanted the lead role in the forthcoming film Lion so badly that he showed up at the Los Angeles home of screenwriter Luke Davies in 2013 to plead for the part. From the moment the young actor heard of the project, he had been intrigued by its improbable story and conflicted hero.

The director Garth Davis was there, too, and the three settled in over fresh ginger tea. But then Patel noticed a whiteboard covered in a blizzard of Post-its. He looked at the notes. “I was like, wait, you haven’t done the script yet?” he said.

They had not. But what was there, in those dozens of stickies, was so captivating that Patel knew he had to have the role. Based on Saroo Brierley’s best-selling memoir, A Long Way Home, the film tells the true story of a five-year-old Indian boy who fell asleep on a train and ended up in Kolkata, thousands of miles from home. Lost and unable to tell authorities the name of his mother or hometown, he was soon adopted by a couple in Australia. Years later, Brierley searched for his family back in India with only help from Google Earth and a smattering of memories.

When the movie had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Patel earned rave reviews for his portrayal of the adult Brierley. In hindsight, he seems so right for the role of this young Tasmanian trying to make sense of his privileged upbringing that it’s hard to believe that Davis, at least at first, thought he was so wrong for it.

He was, Davis said in an interview, too skinny to play the “sporty” character, for one thing. And while Patel, who was born and raised in London, speaks with a British accent and had learned an Indian one for roles in five films, starting with Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, he had never tackled an Australian one.

What Davis was looking for in the character of Saroo, it seemed, was someone a bit less Dev Patel. “His acting style wasn’t necessarily what I had in mind,” the director conceded.

It was clear Patel would have to fight for this one. You seem like a lovely guy, the director and screenwriter told him, but you’ve got to throw your hat in the ring with everyone else. “Actually, they were very sweet about it,” Patel said with a laugh.

Earlier this month, Patel was at a restaurant not far from his West Hollywood home, talking about how he ultimately secured the lead. Tall (six-foot-two) and filled out and sporting the full beard and mustache he cultivated for the role, Patel, 26, looks nothing like the awkward, earnest teenager he played in Slumdog.

For the role of Saroo, Patel met with the director for six hours, plowing his way through every scene. He did a full screen test, capped off by a request from Davis to scream his guts out. “He goes, ‘I want you to lose your mind,’” he said. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but I knew in my head that if I said no, that was it. So I lost it. I completely went somewhere.”

Davis also wanted him to look more like the real Saroo, so off to the gym he went. After playing a sickly Indian mathematician struggling through five British winters in Infinity, Patel was, he admitted, “a twig.” He discussed his weight gain plans with the real Saroo, who noticed him eating a particularly hearty breakfast one day. “He said, ‘I want to get a little bit bigger,’” Brierley recalled. “And he’s definitely done that. He looks sensational.”

To better connect with the character, Patel rode trains across India — “Just so I could understand what it would be like to be on a train that long” — and visited orphanages. Patel also worked with a dialect coach for eight months to recreate Saroo’s Australian accent. “I think everyone was stunned by his accent work,” Davis, who is Australian, said. “It’s flawless, really. Australian accents are very hard — they’re kind of ugly and complicated — but the guy never stopped working.”

“It was very difficult,” Patel acknowledged. An Indian accent is easier for him, he said — “It feels less strange in the mouth” — but even that didn’t come overnight. “If you look at my Indian accent in Slumdog, it was very messy,” he said with a laugh. “Not the best at all.”

The gym, the accent, even a longer, newly grown mane: “It was all part of becoming a bit more alpha,” Patel said. “How could I look more masculine and grown up now.”

The film and role have generated Oscar chatter, but Patel has tried to ignore all of that: “It’s totally flattering, but I didn’t sign up for this role because I thought I was going to get an Oscar. That was the last thing on my mind. When I read the script, I was a puddle of tears. I couldn’t believe this was a true story. We were all in it because we loved these people, and we wanted to live in their skin for a year of our lives.”