The Times Magazine 49He has just returned from spending Oscars
week in Hollywood and is gracious about the
empty, windowless, furniture-free basement
to which I take him to talk.
Having acted professionally for more than
half his life already, he has landed, in some
ways, his biggest role so far: as himself. In Ten
Percent, the British remake of the cult French
comedy Call My Agent, Patel has a cameo
as an actor crippled by awkwardness in an
intimate scene with a supposedly close friend,
played by Emma Corrin. Other cameos in
other episodes come from the likes of Helena
Bonham Carter and Dominic West, a fact that
is still baffling to Patel. “I thought, ‘Why are
you asking me?’ Especially when you’ve got
Jim Broadbent playing someone else [the
founder of the agency], not Jim Broadbent,
and I’m playing me.”
This is not false modesty but a genuine
running confusion over his being cast. “When
they released the cast list for Don’t Look Up
I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And then
they released a grid of all our faces, and mine
was there and I was like, ‘What? What?’ And
I still am a little bit like that.” He shrugs.
His set-up with Corrin is very funny.
The pair struggle to perform a sex scene
together, frustrating the efforts of the on-set
intimacy coordinator, an industry must-have
post-#MeToo. “It was clever in the sense
that it really leant into just how it’s always
awkward,” says Patel.
The point of the show, though, is to poke
fun at the profession – and the professionals- it is portraying. “It is funny. There’s an
absurdity to it, our profession,” says Patel.
“Actors, we all have egos, and a lot of the
time they’re very fragile.”
Patel’s parents, both born in India, came
to the UK in the Seventies, met and “moved
from a town in Cambridgeshire to a village in
Cambridgeshire and then to an even smaller
village in Cambridgeshire”. Now in their
late sixties, they still live in Sawtry, still run
the shop, their son “begging them to retire.
But I think there’s an emotional connection
to it that’s not easy for me to understand
sometimes,” he says.
Growing up, they were the only non-white
and only south Asian family in the vicinity.
I ask what effect that had on him. “The shop
had been shut for a while when they took it
on, so I think the villagers really appreciated
it,” he says. “And my parents are wonderful,
affable people who like being part of the
community, so we were treated well. It was
largely not a racist community, which helped.
But,” he continues, “there’s pockets of it. And
actually there’s a sense that racism is actually
a lot more subtle in ways, and maybe stuff
that I wouldn’t have even deemed to be racist
when I was growing up, because... I couldn’t
attach that word to it.”
Music is one example. His friends at school
were all white and nobody wanted to hear
about the music he was discovering, like Nitin
Sawhney, via his sister, seven years his senior,
or the Bollywood music that his parents would
listen to at home. There was, he says, “a part of
myself that I felt I had to sort of delete to fit in”.
Spotting his talent in a school play, Patel’s
teacher told his parents about a local youth
theatre, where he then spent every Saturday
before graduating to the Young Actors
Company in Cambridge, which he attended
every weekend while his parents “would wait
in the car park for two hours, where they’d
just sleep in the car”. They ensured he did
his A-levels, but “they were also wise enough
to know what made me tick, and so they
supported me when I got EastEnders at 16 and
they supported me when I decided not to go to
university and to pursue EastEnders instead.”
The Masood family – Zainab (actress
and comedian Nina Wadia), her husband,
Masood Ahmed (Nitin Ganatra), and their
four children, Tamwar, Shabnam, Syed and
Kamil – dealt with the gamut of soapily
dramatic storylines including stillbirth,
bankruptcy and divorce, but also broadened
the show’s perspective. As Tamwar, Patel
performed a memorable scene explaining
Islam to his Christian girlfriend – aired a week
after the Paris terror attacks – while his elder
brother, Syed, played by Marc Elliott, was
the first gay Muslim character featured on
mainstream British television; in 2009, this
was considered one of soap’s final taboos.
Patel left the show in 2016 with nothing
to move on to except a bit part as a pigeon
in a show that his friend’s theatre company
was taking to Edinburgh. The avian cameos
didn’t last long, though. He was soon cast
in Yesterday, written by Richard Curtis, as
Jack Malik, a young performer who, after
a freak thunderstorm, is the only person on
earth who remembers the Beatles. Playing
their music, Malik is hailed as the greatest
songwriter of all time.
His musical abilities were undoubtedly part
of what won Patel the role that he describes,
without hyperbole, as “life-changing”. He’d
played piano as a child before teaching himself
electric guitar – “badly” he claims.
But Boyle also saw something else. “There
was a sort of melancholy that he mentioned,”
says Patel. Does he identify as melancholic?
“There is a melancholy, yes,” he says. “I likethinking about the bigger picture of things.”
This is abundantly clear today. He ruminates
at length, weighing his words carefully while
tugging on his beard, pulling up his socks,
crossing and uncrossing his legs. If not
melancholy, there is certainly a gravity.
“I think, from the outside, people are
probably like, ‘Are you OK?’ And I’m
sitting there going, ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m just
thinking about something.’ ”
Yet, he admits, he has also struggled with
aspects of mental health – depression, anxiety.
“It can be all of those things. It’s an ongoing
thing,” he says. “It’s less of a taboo now, so you
can even discuss it and go, ‘Hey, I need this
time every week.’ ” Does he mean time for
therapy? “Time for yourself or therapy or
whatever your therapy is... You have to admit
when it’s difficult rather than gritting your
teeth and saying, ‘Everything’s fine.’ ”
Still, it helped him relate to Jeevan, his
character in Station Eleven, a floundering
writer with whom he shares an “underlying
sense of anxiety about everything”.
The pilot episode of the series was filmed
in Chicago in January 2020, and the plan,
Patel explains, was to finish that in mid-
February and return to Chicago that summer
to shoot the rest of the series. “And then we
just never went back.” When he watched the
first cut of that pilot episode in October 2020,
“Me and my partner, we were crying, because
there were elements of it that we were just
like... It was unfathomable. I don’t know how
many people who’ve now watched the show
are aware that we shot all of episode one
before the pandemic, and there are elements
of it that are just terrifyingly prescient.”
Did that help him deal with the real-life
pandemic any differently – the loss, the
lockdowns, the unpredictability – in his work?
“It’s an odd one,” he says. “The day
we shot the scene with the shopping carts
in the cark park [Jeevan creates a vast caravan
of trolleys, linked together and filled to the
brim], my partner was visiting the set and in
between set-ups she just said, ‘You know, if
this were to happen, that isn’t what you’d
buy.’ She was looking at whatever the set
dresser had put in, and it was meant to
be manic because people were not thinking
straight. And I was like, ‘Yes, but he’s not
really...’ And she was like, ‘Yes, I’m just
being hypothetical. It would be tinned
goods, it would be this, that, the other.’
I was like, ‘OK, fine. We don’t really need
to worry about that.’ ”
A couple of months later, back home
in London, “We ended up doing a big shop
before everyone else because we were just
a bit hyped.” It was, he deadpans, them who
bought up all the toilet roll. nTen Percent is streaming now on Prime Video‘There’s an absurdity to
our profession. A lot of
the time, actors’ egos
are very fragile’
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