SPOTLIGHT - Nikesh Patel - exclusive interview in The Rakish Gent

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From starring in Hollywood blockbusters and Doctor Who specials to playing Shakespeare’s leading men and the perpetual rom-com hero, Nikesh Patel has ticked every acting box. Here, he sits down with The Rakish Gent to discuss representation, race riots and his return to theatre.

His co-stars help Nikesh Patel up off the stage floor, then all four actors take their final bow, the intimate audience at London’s Bush Theatre breaks into enthusiastic cheering and applause. They’ve just experienced Speed, the new work by critically acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Mohamed-Zain Dada, and much like his Olivier Award-nominated debut Blue Mist, his most recent offering is a masterful mix of belly laughs and provocative ideas.

The play is a wonderfully intense 80-minute rollercoaster of blood, sweat and tears—largely from Patel’s character—and a non-stop (there’s no interval) journey of emotions for the viewer. Comedy highs fall into thought-provoking silences before raising blood pressures with unexpected twists and turns in the plot line, the lighting and sound design, and indeed the character arcs.

“It isn’t like anything I've ever read before,” says Patel, 39, of the script that starts life at a run-of-the-mill speed awareness course before crashing into themes around race, stereotypes, bigotry and anger—exploring how the South Asian characters are expected to navigate these. “I have out of body moments when I'm doing it, thinking the audience have no idea of what they're in for, and that's really exciting,” says the London-born performer, who plays the curious speed awareness course facilitator Abz.“Without wanting to give too much away, my sort of elevator pitch for it, is that it's PhoneShop meets Severance,” and “It takes a kind of Black Mirror-esque turn.”

He’s not wrong, the play straddles multiple genres and his character’s trajectory through them requires significant skill. Patel never falters, despite his nine-year hiatus from the stage. “I've missed it,” he admits. “That feeling of, once you start, there's no editor, no one’s calling cut. If you fuck it up, you keep going.” The stage is where Patel cut his teeth as an actor, it’s also what sparked his initial interest in the vocation. “When I was at school, I was fortunate enough to have a lot of opportunities to do extra curricular things that were outside of what my parents knew, and one of them was going to the theatre,” recalls Patel. “From a young age, I just loved stories—I was an avid viewer of television and a reader—and then with the theatre, I thought, ’Oh, you can be in the stories and you can play a part in telling them’.” But even teenage Patel was aware of the lack of representation. “I suppose the block was thinking ‘but we don't do that’.” Patel’s only reference was the film industry in India, and here in Britain, it was the odd South Asian family in a soap “There wasn't a lot of breadth,” he surmises.

Undeterred, Patel “muddled through a couple of school plays, not particularly big parts,” finding more energy once he arrived at Warwick University to study English Literature. “We all try to find ways to reinvent ourselves when we're undergrads, one of mine was to give this theatre, acting thing a bit more of a serious go,” recalls Patel, who played parts including Othello in student productions. “I didn't see it as a career, I just wanted to do it for me, because I got something from it.”

As well as acting, self-confessed “Shakespeare nerd” Patel made the short trip from Warwick to the bard’s Stratford-Upon-Avon birthplace every other week to catch performances—student prices being just a fiver made his works accessible. As Patel entered his final year of studies, “white friends” of his suggested he think about drama school. “I didn't really know anything about the acting world but I did my research, and I said to my parents, ‘I really want to give this a go’.”

Patel’s parents, both pharmacists, gave him their blessing to pursue drama school, as long as he had a back up plan—which he told them would be journalism. He moved back into his parents home in Wembley and was accepted at the prestigious Guildhall School of Drama and Music, graduating in 2010, receiving that year’s esteemed Gold Medal award from the school, and also being named by Screen as one of their UK Stars of Tomorrow. The start of his professional career overlapped his studies when he was cast in a major role in Anupama Chandrasekhar's play Disconnect at the Royal Court Theatre. More stage roles, including many Shakespeare plays, came in thick and fast. TV appearances in Bedlam, Midsomer Murders and Law and Order: UK lead to his big television break, playing Aafrin Dalal, a lead character in the Channel 4 drama Indian Summers, filming in Malaysia for six months at a time, working with Julie Walters—the first of many TV and film greats that he would go on to star alongside. But Patel remains humble, pre-fixing descriptions of the many successful roles he’s played since with terms like ‘fortunate’ and ‘lucky’ throughout this interview.

Of those early days, he also thinks “timing” and a somewhat progressive outlook in the industry, may also have played some part in his success. “We were at the start of what was then called ‘colour-blind casting’, which is a term that I think rightly has been interrogated,” he explains. “But it was this idea that it's make believe, that the royal family and Macbeth don't all have to have the same skin colour. I think being at the start of that, and kind of exploding this idea of who could people those stories, and those worlds, definitely had an impact on me thinking; ‘Oh, I could have a place on that stage or in that story’.”

That’s not to say that every role that professes to be ‘open to anyone’ truly is. “Part of getting older and getting more confident is being able to recognise this. My radar goes up, when I read a script and they want ‘anyone’ to test for the role, but the context of [a certain] scene means that if that person looks like me, it does something to the scene, maybe not overtly, maybe not all the time, but it does,” explains Patel. “I’ve also been presented with scripts that were so fixed on a certain dimension that it didn't feel like a fully realised character. And the thing is, when you're playing that character, you’ve got to find ways to make that person believable. I guess actors have to have a bit of an innate bullshit detector. Because if we don’t feel confident in what we're playing, you'll see it on an actor's face, and ultimately, it's your mug on the screen if you don't know what you're doing.”

A role that has often evaded the South Asian actor in western media is playing the romantic lead, but this is definitely a space where Patel has well and truly smashed up the rule book. In 2021, his part as famous movie star Tom Kapoor, in critically acclaimed comedy series Starstruck, alongside comedian Rose Matafeo, was delivered so convincingly, the much-loved show returned for two more series, seeing huge success in the US too. It followed his lead role in another rom-com, Mindy Kaling’s HULU miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral, where he played banker and wannabe actor Kash Khan, who is caught up in a messy love triangle.

His most recent voyage into the rom-com genre has been starring as Ashkay in the hilarious Picture This, where his character is a potential suitor for the lead Pia, played by Bridgerton star Simone Ashley. Having stepped into the love interest role so many times, Patel was wary of taking on another rom-com. Until he read the script. “I did want to be selective with doing them in future, and this came along, and it was just so fun,” he admits. “The fact that I get to work with Simone Ashley, and then the twist is that actually, [spoiler alert] I end up with Sindhu Vee (who plays Pia’s mother). I was like, ‘yeah, I'll do that’,” he laughs before adding. "I kind of like the fact that [Ashkay] presents as, maybe a bit of a 90s archetype of a brown man, those guys who wear chinos and glasses and are good at their jobs, but what you don't often get to see, or contemplate, is the fact that they’re remotely sexual in any way. Playing with that, and subverting that stereotype, felt really fun.”

Picture This follows a storyline anchored in South Asian culture, and has a majority South Asian cast, which is something Patel is joyous about, but it’s not something that happens often enough. “These are people that, by virtue of the industry, rarely will I get to be on a set where we're all in the job—because someone's got parts for all of us,” he says frankly. “We can dream of that, in the meantime, we can support each other. We’ve built a community where we don't have to have the mindset of ‘limited seats at the table’ but we can gas each other up, and also help each other and say, ‘I heard you're going near that, here’s a warning’. And that's stuff, in the age of NDAs and being careful, you can't always shout out, but as a community, we can look out for each other.”

Working with his ‘community’ is something he also got to experience when filming series five of BBC comedy drama, Man Like Mobeen, which premiered in 2017, but is back by popular demand and will see Patel’s character Naveed return to TV screens this year. Then it’s the much anticipated release of series three, of one of Patel’s biggest parts to date, playing the blood-averse DI Ravi Dhillon in Amazon Prime Video’s The Devil’s Hour, which is filmed and slated for release before the end of the year. The eerie detective thriller stars mega-weight thespian Peter Capaldi, whose spooky, time-travelling, ghost-like character Gideon, has had audiences on the edge of their seats with equal measures of fear and intrigue.

“I mean, he is mesmerising, you cannot take your eyes off him,” say Patel of his co-star. “I remember those particularly early interrogation scenes, that are threaded through the first season, we shot those in a week, so having not done anything with Peter, suddenly I was sat across from him, he's chained to the desk, and I've got my ‘beaten up’ make-up on, and I thought:

‘I'm interrogating Malcolm Tucker’,” laughs Patel, referencing Capaldi’s infamous character from British political sitcom The Thick of It. “I think it's really invigorating to see someone that good.”

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The show, which is at times confusing but always engaging, navigates multiple lifetimes of each character from scene to scene, a conundrum where the biggest clue to what’s happening is often Patel’s differing facial hair from one lifetime to the next. “The reason I'm so fond of it as a project, is a lot of that sci-fi genre stuff usually comes at the expense of emotional heft, or proper character beats, and I feel like that was not the case,” he says. “It feels really ambitious for a British show to do that,”

Patel, who has also starred in films including London has Fallen, Artemis Fowl and The Critic alongside Sir Ian McKellan, as well as in a Doctor Who New Years’ special, has been busy filming and rehearsing non-stop for the last two years, but the biggest role he’s taken on over that time, was becoming a father in January 2024. And then a husband, marrying actor, broadcaster and activist Nicola Thorp last summer. Did that change his priorities as an actor?

“Being a dad is the most life changing, amazing thing. It pulls you in two different directions; it makes you really grapple with questions like; Why am I here? What am I going to leave? Not just for the culture, but literally for my little child,” explains Patel. “Then there's the other side, which is cleaning up poo and blowing raspberries on your daughter's stomach. It makes me think; the weighty, lofty stuff is good, that’s part of being an artist and asking big questions, but also, chill out.” Patel thoughtfully adds: “And, I suppose there's an unwritten third thing of; you’ve got a mouth to feed. It's a fun and sometimes painful negotiation, but it's also quite clarifying in a lot of ways. When you're younger, there's a feeling of gratitude that's often instilled in you when work comes along. Now, I can ask, 'why am I pouring blood, sweat and tears into this?’ Because if it's not money, then it has to be something else, and sometimes it should be money.”

That ‘something else’ is what drew Patel to Speed, which touches on subjects of immigration, Gaza and last summer’s race riots – all things that Patel has been outspoken about in both interviews and on his social media platforms. “I suppose as someone who came from a culture with immigrant parents and the hardships that our parents had to get through, survival was so important that security often meant not attracting undue attention,” explains Patel. “That's not me. I don't have to live with a suitcase packed just in case. But the way the world's going, there’s some people who think they might have to. The politics question is an interesting one. I would like to make good choices. I feel like in sort of really beautiful, complex ways, the play does that.”

And with that, Patel returns to rehearsals ahead of the opening night of Speed, which in the following days and weeks will rack up glowing reviews from industry press and mainstream media alike. Confirming what we already knew, that Nikesh Patel is a talented polymath, able to conquer any role that comes his way.

SPOTLIGHT: Mr Nikesh Patel