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Nina Wadia: "Dev Patel is living the dream"

Dev Patel's Skins co-star Nina Wadia has revealed her delight at the Slumdog Millionaire actor's movie stardom.

The EastEnders actress, who portrayed Patel's mother in the E4 teen show, said that the success "could not have happened to a nicer person".

"He is living the dream and I am so happy for him," Wadia told DS. "I don't even know where to start with that. I'm glad it's happened to a kid like him because he's a decent boy, he's down to earth."

Wadia added that Patel's taekwondo skills will come in useful when he works with Hollywood director M. Night Shyamalan on The Last Airbender.

She said: "When we were doing Skins he showed me his martial arts moves and I said to him, 'Gosh, I really hope you get a martial arts film to do at some point'. And here he is, his next film is with M. Night Shyamalan no less, having just been to the BAFTAs and Oscars. It is so cool - could not have happened to a nicer person."

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Interview with Danny Boyle

IN: Dev Patel was a find.
DB: It's amazing to look at him now at the press junkets. Meeting him at the hotel now, he is so handsome. They dress him up a little bit but he was a kid, you know? He did four or five auditions and every single audition his mom came. I thought, How are we going to get rid of his mom? Serious romantic lead, and he's got his mom attached to him. She is a very nice woman but he couldn't say anything, so it was up to me to separate them.

IN:What went into your choice to cast him as Jamal?
DB: Casting was done in Mumbai, so I met loads of actors there, some very talented young guys. But if you're eighteen or twenty and want to get into Bollywood movies, you've got to be able to get the shirt off. I mean, they stand in the waterfalls in Switzerland and do the song and dance routine, and they've got to be ripped. So they were all beefcake, you know, when guys can't put their hands down because they've got so much muscle mass under there? And because they are eighteen, because they are only just beyond kids, their heads are real small. So you've got these tiny little heads with beefcake bodies, and that was wrong for the film.
So my daughter said, "You should see this guy in Skins," which is this program we are having in the UK. Dev plays a fairly small comic part in it, but he was very good. So I met him and his mom and he was great. He was very serious about the craft. We did not always agree about stuff and fought a couple of times about things, which is good, because I have a bit of a reputation and he was seventeen. I could see he was quite determined and tough. You want your lead actor to be like that. He did not just do what I said and that is a really good sign. I'd say, "You've got to smile now. You've got to fucking smile in this section of the script." And he would shake his head, and that is good.
It gets on your nerves at the time, because you are trying to get the things done and there is so little time, but you want your lead actor to take responsibility for the film and his character; and he had this idea about this character. And I think he was right, the way he did it. he had that sense of himself in the way that Jamal has got a sense of what he wants. Jamal will use this show, not for money but to get back Latika. Nothing is going to stop him, whatever it is. The scene when Jamal jumps in the shit; that is his character completely in that scene. Nothing will stand in the way of his dreams and that autograph. And Dev is a bit like that.