Nikesh is happy to be a heartthrob

NIKESH Patel (left) enjoyed playing a global movie star in the new must-watch BBC3 comedy Starstruck. Especially when his character, Tom Kapoor, got to behave badly.

There’s a touch of ‘wish fulfilment’, Patel confessed, in a scene where Kapoor storms out of an interview at a Press junket. Throwing a strop ‘in the safety of a scripted comedy’ was fun.

Starstruck was written by Rose Matafeo and Alice Snedden — and Matafeo herself plays Jessie, a cinema manager who wakes up from a New Year’s Eve hangover to find she’s hooked up with a huge movie star (Patel).

The show is incredibly watchable; not least because the chemistry between Patel and Matafeo is electric — so much so that there’s talk of a second series. The first was filmed in East London last autumn and winter, observing strict lockdown protocols.

The 35-year-old actor, who studied at Warwick and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, raised temperatures on C4’s Indian Summers a few years back, playing civil serv

ant Aafrin Dalal (and getting several torso moments) in a cast that included Dame Julie Walters and Henry Lloyd-Hughes. They filmed in Malaysia and still keep in touch via WhatsApp — though Dame Julie prefers email.

Patel plays Kash, another thespian, in the ten-part TV series Four Weddings And A Funeral. Based on the film, but with characters created by Mindy Kaling, it’s on Starz but I hope it will be available soon on a UK channel. ‘That was my first foray into the rom-com genre,’ he said; adding he’s not worried about being ‘typecast as a heartthrob’.