“There are actors who have a stratospheric rise straight after drama school and there are others that happens to later on,” says Adeel Akhtar, star of Sherwood, Utopia and Fool Me Once, drily noting that he is in the latter category.
In his twenties, Akhtar was “unemployed for years”; at 30, to reduce living costs, he set up home in a van. “It’s hard to know whether it was simply the difficulty of being an actor,” he says, “or whether it was the context in which I was acting, which was that there weren’t many parts available for people like me.” Did he ever think about giving up and doing something else? “All the time. But one thing my parents instilled in me was that if you start something you’ve got to finish it.”
Akhtar, 44, and I are talking at his publicist’s office in London’s Fitzrovia (he lives south of the Thames in Camberwell). After a string of successful TV and film appearances, it’s safe to say that those lean years are behind him, though experience has taught him not to take anything for granted. Recognisable by his hangdog features — he has been described as looking permanently “sleepy”, which he concedes is accurate — his is a face viewers will know, even if they can’t always summon a name.
He excels at portraying underdogs or men struggling to keep a lid on their darker impulses. He first made his mark as a blundering jihadi who accidentally blows himself up in Chris Morris’s 2010 satire Four Lions. In 2016, he brought unexpected tenderness to the role of a man who kills his daughter after she resists an arranged marriage in Murdered By My Father, and in the first series of Sherwood he played a shy widower who kills his son’s fiancée and goes into hiding. Both parts earned him Bafta Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Collecting his award for Sherwood, he said: “It feels a little bit like a miracle.”
The miracle wasn’t that he won, he says now, but the presence of so many Black and brown faces at the ceremony, among them his friend Meera Syal, who played his mother in the BBC comedy drama Back To Life. He had similar feelings recently when he went to see Slave Play, Jeremy O Harris’s drama about interracial couples, at a theatre that hosted Black Out nights for people of colour. “There is something really powerful about not being a minority in a room,” he says. “It sort of feels miraculous when the [usual] feeling is you defining yourself as what you’re not as opposed to what you are.”
Akhtar’s latest role is in the BBC crime drama Showtrial, which is back for a second series. He plays Sam Malik, an insomniac lawyer hired to defend a police officer accused of the murder of an environmental activist. The officer in question is Justin Mitchell, played with chilling charisma by Michael Socha (This is England, Being Human). While Mitchell makes no secret of his loathing towards the victim, and for climate activists generally, Malik tries to hide his dislike of his cocksure client, who protests his innocence but whose guilt seems certain.
“We’re sitting in that tension,” says Akhtar, “because everyone has a right to a defence . . . The show is interrogating whether that makes Sam’s job easier or more difficult — and I think it’s both.”
Long scenes between Akhtar and Socha in a police interview room have the feel of a play, both in their intensity and the simplicity of the staging. “It was very much a tennis game between us,” Akhtar says. “When I was acting opposite Michael, and he was saying something really confronting, the reactions that we had were very much in the moment. That must be what it’s like, to defend somebody who’s charismatic and who can make you slightly buy into their worldview. And then you have to shake it off and think, ‘No, that’s not how the world is or should be’.”
Playing a solicitor wasn’t a stretch for Akhtar, who, many years ago, nearly became one. His father, a first-generation immigrant from Pakistan, worked as an immigration officer at Heathrow airport before retraining as a lawyer. His son was expected to follow in his footsteps. “It wasn’t even a discussion,” Akhtar recalls. “He said, ‘You’re going to be a lawyer’ and even filled out my [university application] form.”
But Akhtar made no secret of his love of acting, even though British Asians were few and far between in the films and TV shows he watched. He recalls seeing My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and noticing how “these people were defined by their characters and their idiosyncrasies and not simply their race. It lit something up in my brain to know that could exist.”
It was his mother who sent him for speech and drama lessons at school: “She just wanted me to say my T’s properly.” Later, unbeknown to his father, she helped him get into the National Youth Theatre. At 16, he and some school friends put on a production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. It was his first experience of teachers telling him he was good at something, and led to the realisation that “art can really mirror the life that you’re living. And it can be a beautiful release from the tensions that you’re feeling. I found it intoxicating.”
Nonetheless, after school, Akhtar adhered to his father’s wishes and completed his law degree. But just as he was preparing for his legal practice course, fate intervened with a trip to New York. His girlfriend at the time was auditioning for the Actors Studio Drama School, so Akhtar volunteered to be her scene-study partner — “I was there to help her with her lines and make her look good.”
After he got home, the school rang and said they liked what he did on stage and suggested he study there. Akhtar dropped everything and went for it. The course, he says, was “very method-y. It was all about rigour and living the part. They used to do this thing called the coffee-cup exercise, where we would spend ages drinking an imaginary cup of coffee. You had to feel the heat, you had to smell it. After I left, I thought: ‘why not just drink a cup of coffee?’”
Nowadays, he employs a way of working that doesn’t involve imaginary hot drinks: “I’ve got kids, I don’t have time for all that stuff,” he says with mock exasperation. “[Acting] can be complicated or you can be loyal to your first instincts when you read something and not stray too far from that.”
‘Showtrial’ is on BBC1 and iPlayer from October 6
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