Adil Akhtar was nominated for a Bafta Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sherwood. Photo: Jeff Spicer/BAFTA
When it comes to for Baft, Adil Akhtar has a previous uniform. In 2017, he became the first non-white male to win the Best Actor award for Killed by My Father, an honor killing drama in which he played a controlling patriarch.
Akhtar's real reward is he tells me he recently got promoted «from the cereal shelf to the utility room» and he may need to rethink his positioning after this weekend. Akhtar nominated (and likely to win) Best Supporting Actor for Sherwood at Sunday's ceremony; his performance as a widowed train driver who one day goes rogue and commits a violent crime turns powerful and shocking in turn, playing with Akhtar's unsurpassed gift for conveying a sense of humanity.
When we meet on Zoom, I ask if he contributed Akhtar's historic triumph of his career. «I didn't really notice any noticeable changes in the scripts that came to me or changes in the work I did,» he says with a shrug.
“It was such a strange feeling. well, before me there were a lot of Asian actors that I loved who did such a great job and I was «the one» — it [was] a really weird feeling to celebrate it… [and] on at that same time, we not only arrived yesterday.”
Since then, major award ceremonies have made some progress in recognizing underrepresented minorities. I point to the success of the trippy action epic Everything Everywhere, in which most of the Asian actors are helmed by Michelle Yeoh. True to its name, it dominated this year's Oscars.
Adil Akhtar (right) in the frame BBC Sherwood Credit: Matt Squire/BBC
“I am very pleased to know that now we are telling stories that have changed, and we are seeing people on the screen that two or three years ago we would not have seen before, but I wonder how much this has changed the appetite of the industry itself,” he says . “You have to be patient about how this will affect the industry. And it is. In the end it is. Just, like, how long. I'm cautious, not cautious, yes, maybe cautiously optimistic!»
Akhtar, who first came to attention as a Muslim extremist in 2010 in the satirical film Four Lions, is quickly becoming a household name. Yet despite his love of awards and increasingly high-profile acting performances, he occasionally struggles with impostor syndrome.
“I get that feeling all the time,” he says. «I've been talking to someone about this, and the bigger the hurdle or the bigger the feeling, I feel like the bigger the reward in the end.»
Adil Akhtar won Best Actor for Killed by My Father in 2017. Photo: Karwai Tang/WireImage. . He slouches on his couch, constantly fiddling with his beanie, a smile regularly spreading across his famous hanged man face.
His performances, though, often plunge the 42-year-old actor into dark places, and I wonder if does Akhtar, who lives with wife Alexis Burke, a director, and their children in south London, ever bring his work home. “When I first started, I was a little loose, you know, an unemployed actor, didn’t take care of myself the way I should have, maybe went out too much, including emotionally.”
“I guess that's your job when you're in your late 20s: to experience life as much as possible. So, when there was an opportunity to do work that created a lot of emotional depth, that required a lot of emotion, I found that that's when it got messy for me. My head was down or funky.
“But once you have a solid platform of home life that is really easy, like picking up and dropping off your kids, then in your job you have a solid foundation to really explore… when you come home, you’re just a dad, you get yelled at.” your four-year-old child for not doing something.”
I believe this sense of earthiness has become even more important to Akhtar as his star continues to rise. He directed Netflix's screaming detective Murder Mystery 2 and admits that when he filmed the first film in the series, he was thrilled to meet Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, known as the A-listers. “They are legends, heroes of the 90s, right? And I'm a product of the 90s. It was just scary to be around them,” he recalls. “The second time was a lot of fun. I was able to relax a bit… they are just nice, nice people and they understand that they have such an impact on people.”
The biggest pressure, according to Akhtar, was choosing the right songs for Sandler's playlist. “Adam has a big speaker that he walks around with. In between takes, he plays a lot of music. It's really cool and sometimes he gives them to other people to play with,» he explains. “But because it's a team of hundreds and hundreds, lots of extras, when you play music, you're playing it in a mini-festival. There is a lot of pressure to get the music right. I played Van Morrison a lot!'
Akhtar recently reprized his role as Dr. Singh in Sweet Tooth, also on Netflix, a post-apocalyptic tale based on Jeff Lemire's comic book series about a world devastated by a deadly virus and the birth of «hybrid» humans.
“It mirrors and mirrors what we all went through with the pandemic and the lockdown and everything, even though [they] wrote the pilot before it all happened,” he says. “The writers had to go back and tone things down a bit because it was so annoying. [For] the second season, it seems like they really pushed, they really upped the ante for themselves and didn't hold back.»
Actually, the stories that Akhtar enjoys the most are the ones that depict ordinary life. Take Ali & 2021. Directed by Clio Barnard, «Ava» is about a British Asian man who falls in love with an older white woman played by his Sherwood co-star Claire Rushbrook and the social and racial divides they have to overcome in Bradford.
In one scene, a couple drives up to a council estate, where a group of children throw stones at them. It all ends with Ali, a wannabe DJ, kicking off the tunes and getting the youth to dance. It was a standout episode for Akhtar, who has spoken in previous interviews about his experience of racially motivated violence. Ali & Ava, he says, «It was a special experience, a new benchmark for what I want to do.»Akhtar as Dr. Singh in Netflix's Sweet Tooth. Credit: Matt Grace/Netflix
It's strange to believe that Akhtar was once training to be a lawyer (his father «gently nudged/told me I was going to practice law») and was living in a van just over a decade ago trying to make ends meet meet.
“I had nowhere to live. I had nowhere to go. I had this old Volkswagen LT that had been converted… I used it as an opportunity to drive around the UK,” he says. “But it was fun. There were parts that were quite challenging, but there were other parts that were quite life-affirming.”
Akhtar will next see Akhtar cut the yellow ribbon as a police detective in the glossy thriller Lie to Me. One day, the Harlan Coben film adaptation, which also starred Michelle Keegan and Richard Armitage, before glimpsing the «really different,» as he teases, what was coming his way.
Success, fame and, yes , potentially more Baftas could go to someone's head — but not Akhtar, because frankly, he's puzzled by what he does for a living. “My job is that a lot of people look at me and express a certain type of emotion, which, when you think about it, is very strange,” he smirks.
so that everyone else does the work that they do. We're just solving problems, aren't we?»
The Bafta Awards will take place on Sunday at 7pm on BBC One. Sweet Tooth is now on Netflix
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