Adeel Akhtar: ‘It seemed late in the day to start noticing Asian actors … we've been here a really long time'

The Guardian

4 hours ago

A decade ago, it would have been rare to have an Asian actor playing the British prime minister or leader of the opposition. But in the space of a couple of years, Adeel Akhtar has done both. He was the PM in the Netflix drama Black Doves, which took the world by storm last year, and now he's stepping into the shoes of a man vying to be leader of the opposition at London's National Theatre.
For Akhtar, who has been working as an actor for more than two decades, there has been an undeniable shift in the kind of roles he's been offered in recent years. The British Asian experience is no longer a niche subject.
'I wouldn't dream of being offered these types of roles previously,' the 44-year-old tells me when we meet at the National during a Friday lunchtime. 'We're sort of redefining the idea of what an everyman can or should be. We're suddenly in a situation for it not to be a massive thing to be Asian and to be the prime minister; it's just accepted. You can be critiqued in the same way as anyone else, and it doesn't matter what your heritage is. Which really wasn't the case when I first started out. You would find yourself playing a particular type of role over and over again.'
Of course that reflects changes in both British politics – we are, after all, living in the wake of 'Dishy Rishi' in No 10 – as well as evolving attitudes to casting. From Meera Syal to Riz Ahmed to Dev Patel, we're seeing more brown actors stepping into roles where their ethnicity and background are merely incidental, and not the main focus.
'I'm blessed to be able to present some really complicated ideas, and help move conversations on. Working at the National has always been a massive dream,' Akhtar says.
He plays the lead in The Estate, which premieres in early July. Directed by Daniel Raggett and written by Shaan Sahota (a full-time doctor in the NHS), the play explores fictional MP Angad Singh's attempt to become leader of his party.
For Akhtar, it is an opportunity to probe biases within cultures, politics and society. Singh finds out he doesn't have his party's backing, and interrogates the reasons behind that. At the same time, he learns that he has inherited his father's entire estate, while his sisters 'have been completely overlooked'.
The play is based on Sahota's own experiences of growing up in a south Asian community, but Angad's personal sphere is distinct from his political sphere – it doesn't influence his running for leader, and his politics isn't affected by his heritage.
Akhtar may not be a household name yet, but it feels as if he's been in everything. His recent credits are like a roll-call of every massive show on TV over the past few years: Utopia, The Night Manager, Killing Eve, Sweet Tooth, Sherwood, Fool Me Once, Showtrial. He has also starred in films including The Big Sick, The Nest and 2021's critically acclaimed Ali & Ava.
I wait for Akhtar in a small meeting room within the network of nondescript tunnels of the National Theatre building. When he arrives, it's like seeing an old acquaintance. He's wearing a loose blazer from the Salvation Army, rolled-up khakis and a pair of black trainers he 'bought for £30 online'. A faded cap sits askew on his head, giving him the look of a mischievous schoolkid.
Akhtar's dark, hooded eyes and turned-down mouth mean he's described as 'hangdog' in almost every interview he's given, but they're also what make him so relatable. He tells me people often stop him when he's out and about for 'pleasant chats' like they would with a pal. What do they want to talk about?
'Oh, everything,' he says. 'The themes of the shows I'm in, my performance. Particularly Sherwood, which seemed to elicit a huge reaction from people.' Akhtar's devastating portrayal of a man who hides in the forest after killing his son's wife in James Graham's crime drama has often been referred to as a show-stealing performance.
Born in London to a Pakistani father (one of Britain's first Black immigration officers) and an Indo-Kenyan mother, Akhtar knew early on that he wanted to be an actor. As a child he attended speech and drama classes because his parents believed they were elocution lessons that could teach him to 'speak properly'. It was here, during a reading of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky, that he found his love for performing. He went to boarding school in Cheltenham, where he was one of just a handful of brown kids and had stones thrown at him, then did a law degree due to pressure from his father, before retraining at the Actors Studio drama school in New York.
It was in 2002, on his way to audition for the drama school, that he experienced a life-changing incident. Upon arrival at JFK, a fleet of FBI cars pulled up alongside the plane, handcuffed him and took him away. They had mistaken him for a terror suspect.
'I was detained for hours,' he says. 'This was just post 9/11, so everything you're doing is suspicious and triggering, just because of the colour of your skin.' It was a harrowing experience that sparked years of reflection. 'For ages my name was on the system, so every time I travelled to the States I'd set off an alarm and have to be questioned.'
It is ironic that his first film role that same year was as a 9/11 hijacker in Let's Roll: The Story of Flight 93. But Akhtar has said his experience has actually informed some of the work he's chosen to take on, that he's drawn to stories about people who lack a safety net and put their misguided faith in systems that don't serve them.
His first major role came a few years later, aged 30, in Chris Morris's 2010 cult classic Four Lions. Akhtar played a bumbling Muslim extremist who accidentally blows himself up in a field of sheep.
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He calls Four Lions a 'groundbreaking' film. '[Islamic terrorism] was a real hot topic at the time. We were in a situation where we were terrified of the Muslim community, both here and in America. And the film was so irreverent, it just took the teeth out of it. It portrayed these young men as buffoons, clowns, not something to be feared. Because it doesn't matter if it's a bunch of young Muslim lads, or young white lads or whatever, you just get lads in a room and it's going to be a shitshow.'
Despite the success of the film – fans still shout its most famous line 'Rubber dinghy rapids bro!' at Akhtar – the offers failed to come in, and the actor found himself living in a van and desperately searching for work. About that time, he had his beard yanked by a stranger in the street and, on another occasion, a group of men started shouting racist slurs at him when he was with his wife, the director Alexis Burke.
But if Akhtar is holding on to any residual anger, he doesn't show it. 'Even as a teenager, I refused to let anybody tell me I was just one thing, because it's false,' he says. 'If I feel upset by those experiences it means they've won. Whatever they were trying to make me feel worked. The only option is to blankly refuse that. I'm lucky now I can look back on it, with the career that I've had, and interrogate it in different ways.' In fact, he adds, he often draws on his own life in his work. 'I'm always working that way. I ask: what do I have in my experience that is close or approximate to this character?'
Akhtar has the ability to make you root for his characters, no matter how shocking their actions. He won his first Bafta for his performance as the Muslim father who murders his daughter and then kills himself in the BBC Three drama Murdered By My Father, making him the first non-white man to win the lead actor gong (he was previously nominated for Utopia, and has since won a best supporting actor Bafta for Sherwood). It's an event the actor calls 'bittersweet … You can't not celebrate winning a massive award. I was happy and proud of making it happen, but there was also this overwhelming feeling of it being strange. We've been here for a really long time, so 2017 seemed pretty late in the day to start noticing British Asian actors.'
He has become so sought after that his nickname in the business is Ideal Actor, a play on his name. Does he feel vindicated in his decision to stick with acting, despite those years in the van? 'There was never an option of not doing so, because the alternative was returning to a life of law.' What kind of lawyer does he think he would have been? He laughs. 'Oh, a terrible one.'
Over time, the resentment Akhtar once felt towards his father for pushing him into that degree has evolved into understanding. 'I've got kids myself now, an eight- and six-year-old, and I totally get it. My dad came up against a lot of struggles, pain and discomfort. It's the job of a parent to make sure your children don't feel that. He was going to do everything in his power to mitigate against it.'
We discuss that common immigrant experience, of feeling you have to make sacrifices for your parents because of the huge sacrifice they made for you. In fact, he says, he has come to believe that cultural assimilation is the greatest act of creative expression. Even if they couldn't understand his career choices, he feels he can trace his talent for creativity straight back to his parents.
'I'm writing a film at the moment which is loosely based on my mum and her experience of coming over from east Africa,' he explains. 'I was working out why I was drawn to this story. I was thinking of her leaving Nairobi as a 16-year-old. How she got on a plane and flew over. The only thing she could hold on to was this faint idea of what her life could be, and the only thing at her disposal to meet that vision was her sheer will. It's like being in front of an open canvas, or the first page of a novel. There's nothing more terrifying than looking at a horizon and it being blank, with nothing to orient you.'
He dwells on this. 'Maybe that's why I stuck with the acting on some level, because I saw in my parents the tenacity and will to meet your objective,' he adds.
The Estate is Akhtar's second play in two years, after starring in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at London's Donmar Warehouse last year, and he says he would love to do more. It reminds him why he wanted to act in the first place. 'It's just you and the audience. The thing that makes it terrifying is the thing that makes it so fulfilling.'
Is there anything specific he hopes audiences will take away from The Estate? 'We're so multiplicitous as individuals, I just hope people have an insight into an experience they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. In this instance, it's seeing someone who is British Asian in a way they wouldn't necessarily have seen them before. You want people to bypass the nonsense questions – like why is this person in this position? – and get to the proper questions, like am I feeling something true?'
The Estate is at the National Theatre: Dorfman, London, 9 July to 23 August.