Dev Patel relates to heart of ‘Lion’
British actor eagerly pursues role
You’d never know from looking at him, all the things he’s seen. With his mall brand T-shirt and jeans, athletic build and perma-grin, Saroo Brierley seems like your average Australian dude.
But when he was 5 years old, Brierley’s life took a dramatic turn. He was born in a povertystricken Indian village, where he and his siblings spent their days begging for food and searching for fallen coins. One night, while scouring a local train station for change, he became separated from his older brother and accidentally got on a train that took him from his hometown in Khandwa to the overpopulated Kolkata — a journey over 900 miles.
After a harrowing few days alone in the slums of Kolkata, Brierley was picked up by authorities — but he was so young he didn’t even know where he’d come from. He ended up in an orphanage, where he was soon adopted by a well-off Australian couple. That’s how he got to Hobart, the affluent seaside capital of Tasmania and the place he’s called home ever since he was 5.
As the new movie about his life, “Lion,” depicts, Brierley’s life continued along an even more astounding path. When he got to college, he decided to start looking for his long-lost Indian family using satellite images on Google Earth — even though he had only the fuzzy, two-decade-old memories of a child to guide him.
Dev Patel, the British actor, knows how it felt to question one’s identity. Growing up in London, he tried to play down his Indian roots for fear of being bullied. It was only when he traveled to India for the first time at age 17 to film “Slumdog Millionaire” that he started to connect with his ancestral homeland.
“And I think that’s why I connected to Saroo’s story so much, because when you hear him talk — down to the cricket team he supports — he’s an Aussie through and through,” said Patel, who plays the adult version of Brierley in “Lion.” “But when you read the script, there’s two Saroos. There’s this Indian boy with the torn clothes, and then all of a sudden you see this guy going out and he’s dating girls and listening to London Grammar and driving his 350Z. It’s such growth for a human being that it’s almost like they’re two different people.”
“It boggles my mind when I think about it,” Brierley agreed. “That a child can go through such trial and tribulations and come out of it not psychologically scarred.”
Patel, 26, became interested in playing Brierley, 28, before a script for “Lion” had even been written. The actor read about Brierley in the news a few years ago and immediately began “properly You-Tube stalking” him, watching some of the inspirational talks he’d delivered about his journey. When word began circulating around town that Brierley’s story was being adapted for a movie, Patel asked his agents to set up a meeting with the filmmakers.
Patel wound up at screenwriter Luke Davies’ home in Koreatown. “He and Garth (Davis, the director) are still storyboarding the first act on a whiteboard,” Patel recalled. “I was trying to avert my eyes, because it was classified information. It was so premature that I felt very embarrassed. So I had some ginger tea, said hello and then left very awkwardly. They were like, ‘You’re a sweet guy, but listen, we don’t have a script, and you’re going to have to audition.’ ”
He did have to audition — it was a tryout that lasted six hours. After he finally landed the part, Davis laid out a few conditions. He was going to have to put on some weight to look more like a “sporting Australian,” the filmmaker said. And he really needed to nail the accent.
“I just wanted to shake people’s preconceptions of Dev Patel,” explained the director. “A lot of people come to the movie with ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ in mind — that Dev that makes everyone laugh. I just didn’t want that luggage.”
Meanwhile, Brierley was still reckoning with how he felt while watching his story be turned into a film. He largely stayed offset but did travel to West Bengal to watch a scene being filmed on the Howrah Bridge — where he bathed in polluted water when he was lost as a boy in Kolkata.
“Funny enough, I was OK,” Brierley said, referring to watching 8-year-old newcomer Sunny Pawar portray him. “I just wanted to make sure everyone else was all right.”