Magical casting
Dev Patel aims to make ‘David Copperfield’ relatable
When Dev Patel was pegged to play David Copperfield, “I thought it was David Copperfield the magician,” he said. “Obviously, I needed to read more books growing up.”
Now the London-born Patel, a teen discovery who became an Oscar-nominated bankable star, is “colorblind” casting in the title role of English writer-director Armando Ianucci’s “The Personal History of David Copperfield.”
“Armando has his unique spin on this,” Patel, 30, said. “I hate to say it, but for me Charles Dickens was something we were force-fed at school and it was very bleak.
“I’d never read the book but with Armando opening up the world in terms of casting” — the “Slumdog
Millionaire”-“Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” star is of Gujarati Indian descent — “it made Dickens’ story more representative of the Britain I grew up in.
“There’s now the opportunity for another young child to not miss out on this amazing tale because they can now really find a face they can relate to on that screen.”
“This colorblind casting process has been going on in mainstream theater for some time,” Ianucci (“Veep,” “The Death of Stalin”) noted. “Maybe (people feel) films should be more literal for some reason. I don’t know. But this felt very natural really.
“I saw the childlike vulnerability Dev conveys, but in ‘Lion’ also the maturity, the charisma, the stillness. Because I needed that as well as David Copperfield goes on this journey. He starts off poor, vulnerable, angry and lost and we see him gradually discover his identity and assert himself at the end.”
Ianucci is passionate about Dickens, who in the mid-19th century was the most famous writer in the world. His novels have frequently been filmed — “Oliver Twist,” “A Christmas Carol,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Great Expectations.” Why “Copperfield”?
“It was when I reread it about 10 years ago I was struck by how modern it was,” he said. “It really struck home. The themes of identity and social anxiety. Poverty and wealth existing side by side. Bad housing conditions. Mental illness, which he treats really honestly. It struck me as a story I just wanted to tell.
“Also,” the filmmaker added, “the celebration of playfulness, jokes and characters. It struck me as being partly about my life growing up as a poverty-stricken immigrant family in the UK, becoming a writer. But also that feeling of ‘Do I belong?’
“It kind of shouted at me to be made into a film. I just waited until I felt confident enough to do it.”