Dev Patel on ‘Monkey Man,’ Tiny Cars, and Why His First Show Is “the Little Rash That Won’t Go Away”

It’s been 16 years since Dev Patel vaulted into the global public consciousness with his star turn in Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s 2008 Oscar magnet. The intervening years have found Patel demonstrating virtuosic range in roles that include an Arthurian knight, a zealously earnest hotelier, and the David Copperfield. Off the screen, he’s developed range too, with a curriculum vitae that now includes writer, producer, and director.

And for a decade, one project has loomed largest for Patel, who appears on the cover of our 2025 Hollywood Issue: Monkey Man, his ambitious directorial debut, in which he stars as an underground fighter in rural India dead-set on avenging his mother’s death at the hands of a corrupt police chief. Patel thought the film might never find its way onto screens; it languished in the Netflix queue until Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Universal eventually acquired distribution rights.

On a call from Los Angeles, Patel discusses this career crescendo and what comes next.

Vanity Fair: You cowrote Monkey Man; you directed it; you starred in it. Over the course of shooting, did anything still surprise you about inhabiting the character or, more largely, about making the film?

Dev Patel: What’s interesting is the age-old thing of how, as an actor, you come in quite late in the game on the process. It’s more of a myopic view. You’re focused on your character, your accent, your costume, your lines for the day. But it was so astonishing watching it change and evolve as this piece of writing was processed through so many different hands, and mine, whether it was a costume designer, or my DP, Sharone Meir, or via restraints in a pandemic—how we shifted the entire production from India to Indonesia. Everything was surprising, I guess is what I was going to say.

You were a producer dealing with budget issues, a director getting scenes made. How did that change the way you worked as an actor?

We would get everyone else’s coverage, and then the last half an hour of whatever the setup was, or at the end of the day, we’d quickly flip the camera around, and I’d run it cold a few times—which is not the ideal scenario. The sheer physical demands of trying to maintain a physique and keep that amount of choreography crammed in your brain—these are things where if you’re caught not concentrating for a moment, you’re going to get a whack in the face. So it was just pure adrenaline for about nine months. I felt like a man possessed.

And you did accrue some broken bones on set.

I wasn’t quite Jackie Chan, but broken hands, some broken toes, and torn ligaments.

Our first big fight scene was in this bathroom sequence. My hand broke on the first or second day of that shoot. I found a doctor online that was putting screws into bones in Jakarta. We managed to get a [medical] jet so that the insurance company wouldn’t red flag it as breaking our [COVID] bubble. I came back to work the next day and we carried on. It was a way to avoid having this cast put on my hand because we wouldn’t be able to afford painting it out. A baptism by fire.