In Dev's element
Ahead of the release of the fantasy blockbuster The Last Airbender, star Dev Patel tells Screenjabber's Lewis Bazley all about kung fu, the effect of fame on his family and the blessing of Slumdog Millionaire ...
He's gone from playing a sex-crazed teen in Skins to starring in an Oscar-winning drama and striding down the red carpet with his former co-star and girlfriend Freida Pinto. But has Dev Patel changed since he shot to stardom with Danny Boyle's smash hit Slumdog Millionaire? At just 20 years of age, Harrow-born Dev is one of the hottest properties in Hollywood and can soon be seen in The Last Airbender, a new family adventure from Sixth Sense director M Night Shyamalan, in which Dev plays Prince Zuko, the spurned son of the evil Fire Nation.
People have claimed that your kung fu in The Last Airbender is better than Jaden Smith's in The Karate Kid - are you a natural in the field of martial arts?
I agree, I was amazing! (laughs) No, I trained in a Korean version of karate called taekwondo which they teach the Korean military. When I was a young kid, I had a bit too much energy and my mum put me into martial arts training - I still have too much energy though! I was more than rusty going into The Last Airbender but the stunt coordinators Ben Cooke and Mark Rounthwaite were great in incorporating our own talents into their own vision of what our characters should be. So I go to add a few of my own kicks into the film and also incorporate the character's northern Shaolin style.
Is the way Prince Zuko fights integral to the character?
The interesting thing is that the elements that represent the characters in the film really represent the characters' [personalities] themselves. If you think of fire, you think of something aggressive, erratic, uncontrollable and dangerous and that's what my character Zuko should fight like. It's a very hard, aggressive style whereas Nicola Peltz' fighting style was very fluent and natural, as her character's from the Water Nation.
How have the last couple of years changed your life? Can you still walk down Harrow high street?
Obviously, it's changed. I think the one term I used throughout Slumdog was that it was a blessing and I'll say it again, it was a blessing for your first film to have that sort of success in the industry. I wouldn't say it was a dream come true because it was beyond that - I didn't even expect Slumdog to do that well and it did. One of the biggest confidence boosts for me was that Danny Boyle believed in me and put the film in my hands but the second [boost] was that the film did that well, so that was amazing. There were a lot of things I had to become accustomed to really quickly, like the paparazzi, but in general the people that do me are very nice, they're well-wishers.
What do your family and friends make of your success?
What was hardest was the domino effect it has on your family. Getting pictured coming out of somewhere or the rumours that are spread about you… I can deal with them but [it's hard for] my parents having to go to work and explain it to a million different people; 'No, my son's not engaged, he hasn't flown his wedding cake across the world…' But it's made the whole family stronger in a weird way.
Does the massive success of your early career mean there's extra pressure for everything subsequent?
Do we feel the pressure? It's tricky because I'm not expecting another script like Slumdog or a character like him to come 'round, I've accepted that. What you do as a young actor is try to sink your teeth into as many roles as possible. So I went from a TV show where I played a comedic character, like a humping Chihuahua on acid, to going to India to play Jamal Malik, a boy struggling to survive in the slums and trying to reunite with his soulmate, to The Last Airbender. What enticed me to this was the character's a prince of a nation, there's so much more involved, there's so many amazing names attached and as an actor you just try and weigh that up and sink your teeth into as meaty a role as possible. Obviously, what's going to happen in this industry is that everyone's going to compare your last work to what you've just done now but you try and do is come to it with a fresh slate and just act. I came into this industry as an actor and I want to try and put myself in as many different shoes and as many different characters as possible.
So you don't feel pressure to try and make every film and performance an improvement on Slumdog Millionaire?
I'm not looking to top Slumdog and I'm proud of it - if people say it's a good performance then thank you very much and I'll just keep on trying to do more. I can't deny there's a pressure when everyone's expecting you [to top it] but the characters are totally, 180 degrees different. Hopefully I can tap into a different audience with this.
When you're working on a film with a large amount of CGI like The Last Airbender, is there a moment when you watch the final edit and realise what you were acting against or pretending to fight?
I would say [director M Night Shyamalan] and [producer] Frank [Marshall] really tried to put us in as real a situation as possible for a fantasy film. We were flown to Greenland to shoot some of the scenes. So on that front it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. But when I saw the final product, I've got to say I really was so pleased with how it turned out visually and the amount of detail that went into it. You know, they built the entire front deck of my character's ship for me to perform on, which was amazing - but what I was looking out on, I couldn't see! So when I saw the final product, it was amazing. It did require a bit of imagination though.
• The Last Airbender is released in the UK on August 13