Himesh Patel: ‘Ambition is still something I’ve not come to terms with’

Last year, the British actor Himesh Patel spent six months in six countries, following in Matt Damon’s footsteps. Damon is Hollywood royalty; Patel is an increasingly well-known actor who has the uncanny habit of landing significant roles in significant films. Both of them were filming The Odyssey, the new Christopher Nolan adaptation, perhaps you’ve heard of it, in which Damon leads as Odysseus and Patel stars as Eurylochus, his right-hand man. Patel has said previously that Nolan’s sets are no place for actors who expect to be molly-coddled. There are no green rooms in which they can relax between scenes and there are very few chairs on set. (Even when there are chairs on set, they are often in place to denote hierarchy, rather than to be used.) Nolan’s films are also geographically sprawling. The Odyssey was shot in Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Morocco and on a sound stage at the Universal film lot in California. When Tom Holland arrived to shoot scenes in Morocco, the landscape was so occupied by Nolan’s project that it looked “more reminiscent of a re-enactment” than a film set, he said recently. “I’m just seeing Greek soldier, Greek soldier, Greek boat, Greek soldier, the Trojan wars, Greek boat, Greek soldier for… I don’t know if I’m exaggerating, but it felt like miles.”

Nolan is a notoriously hard worker. He has said he likes doing things “the hard way”, which included, while shooting The Odyssey, creating a sound stage within Nestor’s Cave, fabled birthplace of Zeus, at the top of a Greek hill. Patel shot a huge sequence there. “Every day the entire crew walked across a beach and up a hill to fulfil this creative vision,” he said. “And it was hard, physically.” When he first reached the cave set, Patel imagined the recce that must have led to the decision: “Like, ‘Yeah, there’s this tiny little gap in the top of the cave, so we can run some cables through there and harness an entire lighting rig to the top of the cave’ – and voilà…” Nolan expects his staff to work as hard as he does, even if they are megastars; no exceptions are made. “He makes it clear you are there to work and to work hard,” Patel said. “You will never work harder than on one of his sets.” He went on, “John Bernthal said something recently…” Bernthal, best known for television parts in The Bear and The Walking Dead, appears in The Odyssey as Menelaus, the Spartan king. “John said, ‘You’re either a Chris Nolan actor or you’re not.’ And you find that out pretty quickly.”

Patel is a Chris Nolan actor. The Odyssey is his second Nolan film. The first, Tenet, a science-fiction thriller that starred Robert Pattinson and David John Washington, was released in the autumn of 2020, and was so technically impressive that it lured at least a few viewers back to cinemas, post-Covid. Pattinson has said of Tenet that it was very difficult to understand. “It’s one of those films people discover and say, “Oh, I loved it. I don’t know if I followed it, exactly, but my jaw was on the floor…” Patel told me. The Odyssey is easier to understand, it being one of western literature’s major texts. “The odd thing about it is it’s non-linear,” Patel said. “It’s a story told in flashback. So, of course, Chris has made this movie.”

The Odyssey is the world’s great coming home story, and coming home is both a recurring theme of Nolan’s films – “DiCaprio was trying to get home in Inception,” Patel said, “McConaughey was trying to get home in Interstellar” – and a concept that speaks to the Patel of now. When he and I met, a few weeks ago, for a central London brunch, he had only recently returned from Vancouver, where he had spent a month shooting a reboot of The X-Files, created by the American filmmaker Ryan Coogler. Patel has two daughters, who are three and five, and being away from them for any significant length of time seems to have become a sorrowful burden. “You want to be there,” he said. “Obviously you want to put them first, in front of everything else. And that’s not always an easy thing to do around this kind of job, which can be all consuming.” He looked a bit glum. “It’s one of those things you adjust to as you go along.”

Still, like Odysseus, Patel did make it home. On his first day back from Canada he attended his older daughter’s sports day – “First year of school; very little, if any, competition” – and he has since joined the promotional circuit to celebrate the fact he is attached to two of the biggest, most talked-about productions of the year. Before we met, Patel appeared on Chris Evans’s Virgin Radio show, which is filmed as well as recorded and broadcast live, and has the same frantic, slightly unhinged vibe of his very famous 1990s television shows. It was the morning of England’s first World Cup game. Evans and his team were in an excitable, mischievous mood. Patel, who is softly spoken, polite, a little earnest, and who every now and then uses the pronoun “one”, seemed keen to match the energy, but did not quite seem able to.

“You’re so busy,” Evans said partway through the interview. “You are blessed with busyness.”

Patel answered yes.

“How much do we say about the two things that are on the list of conversation today?” Evans asked, referring to The Odyssey, which nobody has been allowed to see – not the press, not even Patel – and The X-Files, which is also shrouded in secrecy and, you would imagine, locked up by NDAs.

“Very little,” Patel replied.

“The Odyssey is happening,” Evans said to the room. “Himesh might be in it.

“I am in it,” Patel said. “I can confirm that.”

On and on the conversation went like this, Patel’s patience seeming to be strained, but never breaking. When he revealed to Evans that the X-Files project was just a pilot, the host seemed incredulous.

“Well, we all know it works,” Evans said, of the franchise’s past success “Unless…” And he paused here for effect. “You haven’t messed up The X-Files, have you?”

In these situations Patel can be “uncomfortable”, he told me later, though you’d think he’ll have to get used to experiencing more of them. Whether he likes it or not, he is one of a handful of British millennial men – alongside Dev Patel, Riz Ahmed, Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland – who now regularly land big roles in Hollywood, and press remains the big burden of that job. “Every now and then people will tell me I’m a star,” Patel said. “And I’m like, ‘Really?!’” He shrugged nonchalantly. “I don’t want to be disingenuous – I get to be in films.” Patel and I had arrived for our restaurant booking at the same time, and as soon as he exited the car that had brought him from the Chris Evans studio to our meeting, a paparazzo stepped out of the shadows and took his picture. This had shocked me, but it had shocked Patel even more, so much that for a while he looked genuinely flummoxed. “That was crazy,” he told me when we shook hands and entered the restaurant. “That never happens.”

It struck me then that Patel seems truly surprised by his fame, even mystified by the profile it might suggest and what it means. Actors are known to sometimes quibble over call sheet numbers – the lower the number, the higher up the call sheet, the more important the actor; status laid bare – but Patel seems nonplussed. On The Odyssey he was number two to Matt Damon, which would have shocked no one, but it wouldn’t have bothered Patel if his own number was much much higher, either. “I don’t really care,” he told me. “My thinking is, at least I’m in it.”

I asked, I suppose as a test, if he was number one on the call sheet while filming The X-Files, in which he stars alongside the American actress Danielle Deadwyler.

“Somewhere around there,” he said, and then, conceding: “It’s a lead role.”

“Joint first?” I suggested.

“Sure,” he said.

And we moved on.

Patel does not seem to have a deep commitment to his own advancement. Or, if he does, he is not yet willing to be entirely open about it with the press. “I’m still figuring it all out, the publicity of it,” he said. “I understand I have to engage with it a bit more, put more work in. But there’s only so much you can control. And you do it by hopefully not being a dick.” He is still trying to understand the career significance of these extracurricular commitments, the circus of radio appearances and social media videos and sit-downs for brunch, “because ultimately my work is what will give me the opportunities”.

Patel is perhaps best known for the variety of roles he’s pursued, an active decision, he told me, to “continue to be challenged, and to learn”. This year alone he will lead The X-Files reboot, appear as Nolan’s Eurylochus, and star as Dr Watson in the third instalment of Enola Holmes, the Sherlock spin-off, alongside Millie Bobby Brown – a treble of big hitters, all distinct in tone. In an email, the actor Riz Ahmed, a friend of Patel’s, described his talent as “profound and versatile”. (He also agreed that Patel is “humble, understated, unassuming” and stocked with “dry wit” and a “quite wicked British sense of humour.”) Placing emphasis on variety has meant that Patel has appeared in all sorts of projects, large and small, independent and big budget. But it also means he hasn’t quite proved to audiences that he has truly honed any one particular skill, which is the sort of thing that can impact a career. When I asked one critic what they thought of Patel, they replied, simply, “He hasn’t made a huge impression on me, I’m afraid,” an indication – quietly damning, I thought – that although Patel’s career has jumped to Hollywood, he has not yet reached a level of artistic achievement that would single him out for significant critical praise.

None of this seems to bother Patel. Partway through brunch, I asked him if he ever lingered on how his projects might be received publicly. “I can’t really worry about that,” he said. “You just give it 100%. Serve the vision. Collaborate as much as possible. And then…” You sit and wait. “For everyone it’s a process of letting go. The writer comes up with a thing and they let it go to the director. And the director lets it go to the producer. And eventually we all let it go to the audience, and really it’s up to them whether or not it’s any good.” Sometimes after a difficult day he’ll fret over specific details – he is only human. “I’m not saying I’m not kept up at night thinking, ‘Oh, I should have done it like that,’ or, ‘That take should have been like that…’” But these are not situations he dwells on for weeks afterwards. Over brunch, Patel seemed more concerned about his radio appearance than his screen work. “Lovely experience,” he said. “But I always worry about these things. Am I a bit…” He grimaced, then sighed and gave up on trying to explain. “I’m getting in my own head about it.”

Patel was born in Cambridgeshire. His parents owned one, then two newsagents, and their life revolved around the serving of their community. Patel’s father, Jitendra, was brought up between India and Kenya, and had an itinerant education. He immigrated to the UK when he was 16, following some of his older brothers, who had already arrived for work. Patel’s mother was brought up in India and immigrated to the UK when she was 21, becoming “a very highly educated Indian woman working in factories”. For a while, Jitendra was refused entry to UK schools. “They told his parents, ‘He’s 16, he can go to work,’” Patel said. Eventually, a headmaster accepted Jitendra and his younger sister, and because they hadn’t yet learnt the language, the school “put on extra English lessons,” an act of kindness that seems to have become a significant part of Patel family lore.

The journey of Patel’s parents looms large in their son’s mind. “It was only recently that I came to terms with it, what a monumental voyage that was for them,” he told me. “I knew all of it on a notional level, but I’d never gone to him and said, ‘Dad, tell me about what that was like…’ And when I did he was kind of nonchalant. Like, ‘Yeah, I was 16.’ ‘And you didn’t speak any English?’ ‘None.’ It was amazing to me.”

In 2016, Patel contributed an essay to The Good Immigrant, an anthology, collated and edited by the author and screenwriter Nikesh Shukla, that reflected on immigration and ethnic minority life in the UK. Patel used the opportunity to dissect his parents’ voyage, a kind of Odyssey in reverse: they left a place of familiarity and searched instead for an unknown land. Who knew what this new world would bring? Who could say what it might entail? “To not know what it’s going to look like,” Patel said. “To have to believe there’s something in front of you…” He shook his head. “It’s just that leap they took that is so mind blowing.”

Like Nolan, Patel’s parents are extremely hard workers, and they expected their children to work hard, too. (They have a daughter, Patel’s older sister.) They still run one of their newsagents, though Patel, who met none of his own grandparents, would prefer them to retire, live the good life getting to know their grandchildren. “I have parents who’ve worked themselves so hard, more or less for us, for their kids,” Patel said. Like many second-generation immigrants, he is conflicted about how this might have impacted his psyche: on the one hand, he is now a hard worker, too. On the other, “the guilt it creates, unknowingly, the expectation that is set for you, that high bar…” For a long time, Patel had to “learn how to be kind to himself” – he considered nothing he did to be quite good enough. “For them, they had no choice,” he said of his parents. “It was, ‘If we don’t take the reins and build something for ourselves, our kids aren’t going to have the life we came here for.’ So they decided to tunnel-vision into work. And they still do it, because they don’t know anything else.”

I asked Patel if he considered himself a good fit for Nolan’s films because his parents had taught him the value of hard work. “Maybe it is a work ethic thing,” he said, though he seemed unsure, “and, yeah, that probably comes from my parents. And I’ve had to do a little bit of going, ‘No, you do work hard. You do put in the hours.’ But there’s always something else. Always a way to refine it. Always a way to push things a little bit more.” He went on, “But there are other things to consider. You get on a set like The Odyssey, and Matt Damon is number one on the call sheet, one of the most defining film actors of a generation. I was looking forward to seeing how he worked, but nothing could have prepared me for how hard he worked. That’s number one on the call sheet. What excuse does anybody else have? Nobody’s working harder than that guy.”

When I asked if he had ever reflected on his own ambition he came close to rolling his eyes. “It’s funny, ambition,” he said. “It’s still something I’ve not come to terms with: that I do have ambition, and that that’s OK, I don’t have to be apologetic about it. What I love about my parents is that they value kindness and humanity, and watching them in the shop, the way they serve people, with kindness, generosity, I value that. And I don’t think that should ever take second place to ambition. And, yes, sometimes they’ll have regrets – if we’d just been a little bit more selfish, because that’s what capitalism rewards – but I value their humanity and their kindness more than I ever would have valued them making more money.”

It all began in Albert Square. He attended an audition for EastEnders on the day of his last GCSE exam. He was 16, still a paperboy on his parents’ route. The audition was scheduled for 3pm, at the BBC Elstree Studios, in Borehamwood. “As I was waiting in a hallway I was invited back to audition a week later – and got the job,” he told the Guardian in 2024. “My dad had gone to the loo and missed it all.”

On EastEnders, Patel played the part of Tamwar Masood, “a quiet boy who could be described as a geek, but who is quite single- minded and will do what he wants,” Patel has said – a description that could have applied to him in real life. Masood was one of several Asian characters introduced to the soap in 2007 by the show’s producer, Diederick Santer. Patel’s father was played by Nitin Ganatra; his mother was played by Nina Wadia. Both actors are part of a slightly older generation of British actors with South Asian heritage – along with Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar, among others – who Patel believes were in constant competition for fewer roles. 

Part of the magic of Patel’s career is that he’s one of a few young British actors of colour whose characters don’t involve ethnicity as a primary factor of their identity, and he is aware that that has only been possible because of those who came before, actors who had been through their own particular kind of typecasting struggle. Even as recently as 20 years ago there was a scarcity of opportunities for brown actors. “Nitin and Meera and Sanj, they all get on,” Patel told me. “But there would be one role every few months, and they’d all be going for it, and…” He feigned a fistfight. “Look,” he went on. “We all have egos. And those egos manifest in unhealthy ways sometimes. And I don’t want to foster anything like that. That’s anathema to what we want to achieve…”

When Patel was at school, a self-described nerdy kid, never one of the football boys, he attempted on various occasions to share the culture he was born into, only for it to be rejected, a “result of the fact that the culture I grew up in was not the dominant culture and when I tried to share elements of that culture” – the music of Bollywood, specifically – “it sort of butted up against the zeitgeist.” Patel spoke Gujarati at home, while his father introduced him to “elements of British culture – Peter Sellers, Monty Python, music he had only a vague understanding of”. His childhood was a consistent one full of hard work and dual identity, and now he understands he is in the midst of coming to terms with that – look where it has got him, all this hard work; to Hollywood! – and of learning how to pass on that inheritance to his children. “You find me in the thick of it,” he told me. “Of asking, ‘OK, how are we actually going to do this?” He shrugged an amused shrug. “But I think we’re finding a way.”

The Odyssey is in cinemas on 17 July

Grooming Nao Kawakami using JVN & Omorovicza; lighting director Ben Kyle; fashion assistant Connor Patrick O’Brien