"I am nuts" - Dev Patel
After debuting on the hugely successful British TV show Skins, Londoner Dev Patel enjoyed enormous success as the lead in the multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire, in which he played a Mumbai teen suspected of cheating in the Indian version of “Who wants to Be A Millionaire?” With The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Dev returns once again to India to play Sonny, the young but enthusiastic manager of a hotel for retirees.
Q: The basic idea behind Marigold is the outsourcing of retirement; how do you fit into the picture?
A: I play Sonny who runs the hotel in India that they’ve come to retire to. This group of old age pensioners, played by Judy Dench, Maggie
Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup - all end up there for various reasons. The problem is, the hotel has been marketed as this beautiful home for the elderly, but it’s not quite as it seems. Frankly, it’s a shambles.
Q: What kind of a guy is Sonny?
A: Sonny is a Duracell battery; he's just got crazy energy. Everything goes wrong but he's so endearing because he has this forever-optimistic view of everything. He has this saying: ‘Everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it's not yet the end'. He's the comedic relief. I'm slightly slap sticky in it. He's bouncing off the walls. I wish I had a tranquilizer in some scenes.
Q: Do you have a similar youthful energy yourself?
A: I'm kind of nuts, in a way, very hyper and I don't have the longest attention span. It really struck me as a character I wanted to play because it is about a boy becoming a man. It is also a coming of age story for the pensioners; this story shows that no matter how old you are, there's always room to change, learn, improve and be enlightened. In Sonny’s case he's trying to prove to his mother that he can run this place.
Q: When you worked on Slumdog Millionaire you took a job in a call center for a while. Did you do something similar for this, like go and work in a hotel?
A: I didn’t this time because the more inexperienced and spontaneous it was the better, as that's basically him. What I did have to do though was a lot of work on the accent. He's well spoken and very articulate but it has to be in this thicker Indian accent, which was very hard as I’m speeding through lots of crazy dialogue.
Q: What did you do to get it right?
A: I had a coach, and also I pestered everyone on set from the costume department to the lighting boys. You pick up certain traits - like the head nod and certain ticks and things, which obviously a dude from Harrow wouldn't know about. But I've had lots of exposure to India. I've been there many times.
Q: Did you have any concerns about returning to India to shoot a film after the success of Slumdog?
A: Yes. The majority of the scripts that get sent to me are for Indian characters, but I try to be very selective. I read the first draft of this script and I was absolutely excited. Then I started to have cold feet about it because I'd been through India and done Slumdog and obviously that was so big. I didn't want to be typecast. However when John (Madden, director) came on board, my hesitation dissipated. Sonny is kind of cheesy in a way; he's overly endearing and optimistic. John saw him as an everyday young guy who dresses in jeans, fancies girls and wants to have sex. I thought it was great to make him more human and rounded instead of just a caricature.
Q: Well you debuted with Slumdog, a huge project, then maybe took some hits for The Last Airbender...
A: Oh, Airbender was humbling, for sure.
Q: That was your first American movie. Did you feel the difference?
A: The downfall of that wasn't necessarily that it was an American film; it was more to do with the scale of it. I prefer to do something like Marigold, where you don't get paid a lot of money, but you just feel so much more connected to the piece. When you go into it you have a vision, and you can still grasp that instead of being diluted in this massive, 150 million dollar film and have no say. You want to feel like you can mold your character and really carve something into a movie. In Marigold you can and for the rest of my career I would happily do these indie films.
About THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL
For a disparate group of English pensioners (Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup), retirement takes an unconventional turn when they abandon their homeland, enticed by advertisements for THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, a seemingly luxurious sanctuary for “the elderly and beautiful” in Jaipur, India. On arrival, they discover that the hotel falls somewhat short of the romantic idyll promised in the brochure, but they are gradually won over by the ever-optimistic young manager Sonny (Dev Patel), and tentatively embark on a new adventure, finding that life can begin again when you let go of the past.
After debuting on the hugely successful British TV show Skins, Londoner Dev Patel enjoyed enormous success as the lead in the multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire, in which he played a Mumbai teen suspected of cheating in the Indian version of “Who wants to Be A Millionaire?” With The Best...
After debuting on the hugely successful British TV show Skins, Londoner Dev Patel enjoyed enormous success as the lead in the multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire, in which he played a Mumbai teen suspected of cheating in the Indian version of “Who wants to Be A Millionaire?” With The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Dev returns once again to India to play Sonny, the young but enthusiastic manager of a hotel for retirees.
Q: The basic idea behind Marigold is the outsourcing of retirement; how do you fit into the picture?
A: I play Sonny who runs the hotel in India that they’ve come to retire to. This group of old age pensioners, played by Judy Dench, Maggie
Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup - all end up there for various reasons. The problem is, the hotel has been marketed as this beautiful home for the elderly, but it’s not quite as it seems. Frankly, it’s a shambles.
Q: What kind of a guy is Sonny?
A: Sonny is a Duracell battery; he's just got crazy energy. Everything goes wrong but he's so endearing because he has this forever-optimistic view of everything. He has this saying: ‘Everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it's not yet the end'. He's the comedic relief. I'm slightly slap sticky in it. He's bouncing off the walls. I wish I had a tranquilizer in some scenes.
Q: Do you have a similar youthful energy yourself?
A: I'm kind of nuts, in a way, very hyper and I don't have the longest attention span. It really struck me as a character I wanted to play because it is about a boy becoming a man. It is also a coming of age story for the pensioners; this story shows that no matter how old you are, there's always room to change, learn, improve and be enlightened. In Sonny’s case he's trying to prove to his mother that he can run this place.
Q: When you worked on Slumdog Millionaire you took a job in a call center for a while. Did you do something similar for this, like go and work in a hotel?
A: I didn’t this time because the more inexperienced and spontaneous it was the better, as that's basically him. What I did have to do though was a lot of work on the accent. He's well spoken and very articulate but it has to be in this thicker Indian accent, which was very hard as I’m speeding through lots of crazy dialogue.
Q: What did you do to get it right?
A: I had a coach, and also I pestered everyone on set from the costume department to the lighting boys. You pick up certain traits - like the head nod and certain ticks and things, which obviously a dude from Harrow wouldn't know about. But I've had lots of exposure to India. I've been there many times.
Q: Did you have any concerns about returning to India to shoot a film after the success of Slumdog?
A: Yes. The majority of the scripts that get sent to me are for Indian characters, but I try to be very selective. I read the first draft of this script and I was absolutely excited. Then I started to have cold feet about it because I'd been through India and done Slumdog and obviously that was so big. I didn't want to be typecast. However when John (Madden, director) came on board, my hesitation dissipated. Sonny is kind of cheesy in a way; he's overly endearing and optimistic. John saw him as an everyday young guy who dresses in jeans, fancies girls and wants to have sex. I thought it was great to make him more human and rounded instead of just a caricature.
Q: Well you debuted with Slumdog, a huge project, then maybe took some hits for The Last Airbender...
A: Oh, Airbender was humbling, for sure.
Q: That was your first American movie. Did you feel the difference?
A: The downfall of that wasn't necessarily that it was an American film; it was more to do with the scale of it. I prefer to do something like Marigold, where you don't get paid a lot of money, but you just feel so much more connected to the piece. When you go into it you have a vision, and you can still grasp that instead of being diluted in this massive, 150 million dollar film and have no say. You want to feel like you can mold your character and really carve something into a movie. In Marigold you can and for the rest of my career I would happily do these indie films.
About THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL
For a disparate group of English pensioners (Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup), retirement takes an unconventional turn when they abandon their homeland, enticed by advertisements for THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, a seemingly luxurious sanctuary for “the elderly and beautiful” in Jaipur, India. On arrival, they discover that the hotel falls somewhat short of the romantic idyll promised in the brochure, but they are gradually won over by the ever-optimistic young manager Sonny (Dev Patel), and tentatively embark on a new adventure, finding that life can begin again when you let go of the past.
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