Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries.
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Actor Dev Patel has pursued interesting, complex roles in Hollywood since his arrival in Slumdog Millionaire fifteen years ago. He joins us today to discuss Monkey Man, his directorial debut and most personal project to date.
At the top, we walk through the Hindu mythology that inspired the film, his decade-long fight to get the project greenlit, and the conditions of filming on an island during the pandemic. Then, Dev describes his intense creative process, how he landed his TV debut at sixteen as a sex-crazed teenager on Skins, and his life-changing role in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.
On the back-half, Patel reflects on his years in The Newsroom, the films that followed, including Garth Davis’ Lion and David Lowery’s The Green Knight, and how director/producer Jordan Peele saved Monkey Man from oblivion.
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From the episode:
Sam Fragoso: Making this film [Monkey Man] was hard. When you were struggling in post-production, what did producer Jordan Peele see that others could not?
Dev Patel: We got on. Our first conversation was almost three hours long, and he understood what I was going for, which is to use genre as a Trojan Horse to talk about more. I didn’t want to just do a film that just had a barrage of punches and kicks that kind of wash over you like a video game. I wanted the emotional punches, the political punches, the kicks to mean something too. I wanted to talk about violence against women, about the caste system, about religion. Basically, it’s a revenge film about faith. Jordan got all of those things. As a guy who does that incredibly well with his films, I think he saw that. And at the same time, he’s someone that was able to step out of a kind of box that he was put in and reinvent himself. There’s a line in Monkey Man, this character Alpha tells me, “you need to destroy in order to grow, to create space for new life.”
I was reading about the Aboriginals in Australia and controlled burnings in order to nourish the soil to create new life. And I just thought, what an incredible philosophy. I had to destroy myself, my old avatar of myself, destroy everything. I wanted to destroy the image the audience had of me or all of those, even the guys that we’d hired and we fired because they overlooked me as this silly actor. I wanted to prove them all wrong. I wanted to destroy that perception.
SF: And did you?
DP: I mean, the last song in the movie is called “Grow” by Facesoul. That’s me hopefully growing. This is a new chapter, I hope.
