Dev Patel Trivia: 42 interesting facts about the actor!

Dev Patel is an English actor, best known for his role at Slumdog Milionnaire. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about him!

1.He was born on 23 April 1990.

2. Dev Patel was born in London, England.

3. His mother, Anita, is a caregiver, and his father, Raj, an IT consultant.

4. His parents are Gujarati Hindu Indians.

5. Both of them were born in Nairobi, Kenya, where there is a significant Indian community; they expatriated to England separately in their teens, but only met first in London.

6. Dev Patel was raised in the Hindu faith.

7. Dev Patel grew up in Rayners Lane, Harrow, and attended Longfield Middle School

8. He had his first acting role as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the school’s production of Twelfth Night.

9. Patel was given the Best Actor award for his performance.

10. He later attended Whitmore High School, receiving an A* in GCSE Drama, for his “self-penned portrayal of a child in the Beslan school siege”.

11.  He was awarded full marks for his GCSE performance to a live audience and the visiting examiner was moved to tears by his honest portrayal”.

12. He completed his AS Levels in PE, Biology, History and Drama in 2007 at Whitmore High School, while he was working in Skins.

13. Patel said that as a kid, he was “bloody energetic” and used to get in trouble at school because of it

14. He started training at the Rayners Lane Academy of Taekwon-do in 2000.

15. He competed regularly in both national and international championships, including the 2004 AIMAA (Action International Martial Arts Association) World Championships in Dublin, where he won a bronze medal.

16. The World Championships took place in October 2004, when he was a red belt competing in the junior division against other red and black belts. He made it to the semi-finals, where he lost to an Irish black belt named Niall Fitzmaurice in “a very close and tough fight”, and ended up winning a bronze medal.

17. He later gained a 1st dan black belt on 11 March 2006.

18. In 2006, Patel began his acting career when he auditioned for the E4 teen drama television series Skins.

19. Patel’s mother saw the casting ad in a newspaper and took him to the audition even though he had a science exam the next day.

20. After two auditions, he was cast in the role of Anwar Kharral, a British Pakistani Muslim teenager. he characterisation of Anwar was partly based on Patel’s personality and the role was written specifically for him after he was cast in Skins.

21. Patel, who had no professional acting experience, said that on “the first day of shooting I didn’t really know what to do.”

22. The first series of the show aired in January 2007 and went on to win the Rose d’Or for Drama in 2008 and receive a nomination for Best Drama Series at the 2008 BAFTA Television Awards.

23. Dev Patel reprised his role as Anwar for the second series of Skins, which aired in February 2008.

24. The second series of Skins won the Philips Audience Award at the 2009 BAFTA Television Awards.

25. Dev Patel made his feature film debut when he was cast in the role of Jamal Malik, the central character in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire. The character Jamal Malik is an Indian Muslim boy born and brought up in the poverty of Bombay, India.

26. Boyle considered hundreds of young male actors, but found that Bollywood leads were generally “strong, handsome hero-types”, not the personality he was looking for.

27. Boyle’s 17-year-old daughter Caitlin pointed him to Skins.

28. After five auditions for the role,  the actor was eventually cast in August 2007

29. The film’s producer found the original choice for the lead role, Ruslaan Mumtaz, too good looking for the role.

30. After the release of Slumdog Millionaire at the end of 2008, Patel went on to receive a number of awards for his performance, including a British Independent Film Award,  National Board of Review (NBR) Award,  Chicago Film Critics Association Award, and two Black Reel Awards for Best Actor and Best Breakthrough Performance.

31. Patel was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2009 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards. The award eventually went posthumously to Heath Ledger for his performance in The Dark Knight, though Patel did win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, which he shared with ten other cast members from Slumdog Millionaire.

32. On 8 January 2009, Patel won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Young Performer.

33. He was also nominated for two London Critics Circle Film Awards, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor, the 2009 BAFTA Award for Best Leading Actor  and European Film Award for Best Actor.

34. From 2012 to 2014, Patel had a supporting role in the 2012 HBO television series The Newsroom as Neal Sampat, blogger for news anchor Will McAvoy.

35. He also appeared alongside James Franco and Heather Graham in About Cherry, which premiered at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival.

26. In 2014, Patel starred alongside Robert Sheehan and Zoë Kravitz in the film, The Road Within, about three unlikely friends, one with Tourette’s syndrome (Sheehan), one with OCD (Patel) and an anorexic woman (Kravitz) who go on a road trip. The film received generally mixed reviews.

37. In 2016, Patel starred as Saroo Brierley in the biographical film Lion, directed by Garth Davis and co-starring Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara, which premiered to rave reviews and “Oscar buzz” at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.

38. The film is based on the non-fiction novel written by Brierley titled A Long Way Home

39. Patel has been nominated for the BAFTA awards, in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category.

40. At the 89th Academy Awards, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Lion.

41. He began dating his Slumdog Millionaire co-star Freida Pinto in 2009.

42.On 10 December 2014, the couple announced that they had split after nearly six years of dating