Shortly earlier than the vacations in 2024, Emma Thomas — producer, Christopher Nolan‘s wife and the keeper of his secrets — met Himesh Patel in London and handed him a physical copy of a screenplay. No emailing, no secure digital upload. Just a script, passed across a table. “That’s how he does issues,” says Patel. “It’s a very covert operation.”
That script, it turned out, was for The Odyssey, Nolan’s much-anticipated, gloriously overstuffed $250 million adaptation of the best journey story ever advised — gods, monsters, wine-dark seas and all — with a forged that features Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Matt Damon and a taking pictures itinerary that stretched throughout six nations on three continents.
After all, this wasn’t Patel’s first time working with Nolan, although the circumstances with Tenet, by which the 35-year-old actor had a small function as an arms supplier, couldn’t have been extra completely different. For that 2020 time-travel thriller, he obtained audition sides from Ocean’s Eleven and didn’t see a web page of the true screenplay till he arrived on set in Tallinn, Estonia. Even then, they solely gave him his personal character’s scenes. “He has a sort of in-house mentality with the people he works with,” Patel says of Nolan. “I had a lot of fun on Tenet and got on really well with him, and I think that has a lot to do with it. He certainly doesn’t need to ask anyone back.”
Patel grew up in a small village in the midst of England, carried out with The Younger Actors Firm in Cambridge and turned skilled at 17 — spending the following 9 years taking part in the quiet, bookish Tamwar Masood on the British cleaning soap EastEnders. His first massive break got here in 2019, when he scored the lead function in Danny Boyle’s Beatles-inspired rom-com Yesterday. “In a sense, it was baptism by fire,” he says of the movie, “but it didn’t feel like fire because I had so much support.”
Within the years between Tenet and The Odyssey, Patel appeared in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up — as Jennifer Lawrence’s boyfriend, no much less — and earned an Emmy nomination and a SAG Award for his work in HBO’s Station Eleven, the postapocalyptic miniseries. He was unaware that both the present or his efficiency was within the awards dialog till the nominations had been introduced. “Now that I’ve learned how awards work — all the campaigning and effort that goes into it — I do feel proud that it was more meritocratic for me.”
Patel (proper, with Matt Damon) in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Melinda Sue Gordon/Common Footage
The Nolan name got here at an anxious second. Patel had been ready for phrase on whether or not HBO would renew The Franchise, the superhero-production spoof by which he starred alongside Daniel Brühl, Billy Magnussen and Lolly Adefope. When his brokers reached out, he assumed that’s what the decision was about. It wasn’t. The Franchise cancellation got here just a few weeks later. “A real shame,” he says — not only for the present, which he thought was good, however for the forged, with whom he’d turn out to be shut mates.
The tv gods, because it occurred, had different plans. He’s at present in Vancouver taking pictures Ryan Coogler’s long-awaited X-Information reboot (he’s Zooming in carrying a Pacific Northwest-appropriate fleece). He’ll be joined by Station Eleven co-star Danielle Deadwyler — the 2 by no means shared display screen time on that sequence as a result of their characters existed in several timelines, however they met on the Chicago set six years in the past and have stayed in contact. He can’t say a lot, together with whether or not he’ll occupy the Mulder function or the Scully. “There’s a wall just outside Ryan’s office,” he says, “and they took Polaroids of all of us, and we had to define ourselves as skeptics or believers. I wrote that I’m a believer — but only one time out of 10.”
In terms of The Odyssey, by which Patel performs Eurylochus, Damon’s second-in-command, he can reveal barely extra. As an illustration, Nolan insisted that his forged use American accents relatively than Greek or British. It was the biggest manufacturing Patel has ever labored on, and he was stunned to seek out practically each scene and stunt shot was in-camera with sensible results. It meant spending weeks on a ship within the open ocean, an Imax digicam affixed to an adjoining ship and one other beaming down from a helicopter overhead. He spent one other week in a collapse Greece, then shot from the highest of a citadel whereas the forged climbed a mountain time and again.
“This is implied with every job,” Patel says, “but it’s most pressing when a director trusts you to be their guy: Don’t fuck this up.”
To this point, so good.
This story appeared within the June 10 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.
