46 The Times Magazinentil his early twenties, Himesh
Patel worked two jobs. The first,
requiring him to rise far earlier
than his personal circadian
rhythms desired, was a daily
paper round – his parents own
the village shop in Sawtry, the
small Cambridgeshire village
in which he grew up.
The second – no less tiring,
since it involved a four-hour round-trip drive
to Elstree Studios (“There’d be times when
I had to stop at a service station for half an
hour’s sleep”) – was, at least, a little better
paid: starring in EastEnders.
For nine years, Patel, now 31, played
Tamwar Masood, the son of the soap’s first
Muslim family since the Eighties, who moved
into Albert Square in 2007. For the first five
years he appeared in the show, beaming into
eight million British front rooms, four nights
a week, Patel not only lived at home but
dutifully kept up his paper round too.
A decade on, he finally has “the privilege
of being able to say no to stuff”, to be “a bit
picky about work”, after a year in which he
has starred in the critically acclaimed drama
series Station Eleven and appeared alongside
Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio and
Meryl Streep in the Oscar-nominated film
Don’t Look Up.
You’ve perhaps also caught him, over the
past couple of years, in Yesterday – his first
film, directed by Danny Boyle, in which he
starred alongside Lily James – in Christopher
Nolan’s Tenet, alongside Robert Pattinson
and Michael Caine, or in The Aeronauts,
with Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones.It appears not so far. Station Eleven is one
of the most lauded shows of the year (if quite
tricky to find in the UK, available on the
Prime Video bolt-on Starzplay. “A lot of my
friends have found it a bit difficult to access,”
says Patel diplomatically), a high-end epic
adapted from the bestselling – and spookily
prophetic – 2014 novel by Emily St John
Mandel about, erm, a worldwide pandemic
that wipes out most of the global population.
Patel’s protagonist, Jeevan, among other
challenges, “gets his leg eaten by a wolf and
then he wakes up and there’s a bunch of
women and they’re all giving birth at the same
time. If someone were to pitch that to you,
you’d be like, ‘OK...’ But it works.” And it’s
a lot more hopeful and transportive than it
sounds, I swear.
Don’t Look Up, meanwhile, a satire about
science, politics, public understanding and
a comet threatening to hit Earth – in which
Patel plays Phillip, an unscrupulous clickbaity
journalist and boyfriend to Jennifer Lawrence’s
stressed-out scientist – is an allegory about
climate change, written long before the
coronavirus outbreak, but the release of which
in December 2021 felt highly pertinent. In
what could quite fairly be categorised as his
“apocalyptic period”, “I did two projects that
came out within a week of each other in the
US where my character gets told that the
world’s ending and has a panic attack,”
chuckles Patel.
Today, the actor arrives on foot from his
home in north London – where he lives with
his partner and their 16-month-old daughter- bearded and backpacked, panic-free, to a
studio complex by a canal in east London.
U
‘I think there’s still a snobbery about the sort of actors that do EastEnders’
It’s a rare feat for a British soap actor,
this Albert Square to A-list trajectory. The
Americans and Australians often manage it
much better: Susan Sarandon (A World Apart),
Brad Pitt (Another World), Julianne Moore
(As The World Turns), Guy Pearce and Margot
Robbie (Neighbours), Chris Hemsworth
(Home and Away)...
“I think there’s still a perception within
our industry of the sort of actors that do
EastEnders, or the sort of show EastEnders
is, the perceived quality of it compared with
something like, say, The Crown,” says Patel.
There is, he believes, a bias against British
soap actors born simply of “snobbery”.
He sees his EastEnders years as a sort of
acting apprenticeship and is keen to “give
young people access and demystify it, to
decelebrity-fy it – that’s not a word, but you
know what I mean. It’s a wonderful job, but
the work is not glamorous.” All that said, he
admits, “There was a fear for me when I left
[EastEnders], going, ‘Is it going to preclude me
from doing stuff ?’ ”In Danny Boyle’s YesterdayWith Phaldut Sharma in EastEnders, 2013 With Don’t Look Up co-stars including Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl StreepBBC, GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY, SHUTTERSTOCK