It’s been 16 years since Dev Patel vaulted into the global public consciousness with his star turn in Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s 2008 Oscar magnet. The intervening years have found Patel demonstrating virtuosic range in roles that include an Arthurian knight, a zealously earnest hotelier, and the David Copperfield. Off the screen, he’s developed range too, with a curriculum vitae that now includes writer, producer, and director.

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And for a decade, one project has loomed largest for Patel, who appears on the cover of our 2025 Hollywood Issue: Monkey Man, his ambitious directorial debut, in which he stars as an underground fighter in rural India dead-set on avenging his mother’s death at the hands of a corrupt police chief. Patel thought the film might never find its way onto screens; it languished in the Netflix queue until Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Universal eventually acquired distribution rights.

On a call from Los Angeles, Patel discusses this career crescendo and what comes next.

Vanity Fair: You cowrote Monkey Man; you directed it; you starred in it. Over the course of shooting, did anything still surprise you about inhabiting the character or, more largely, about making the film?

Dev Patel: What’s interesting is the age-old thing of how, as an actor, you come in quite late in the game on the process. It’s more of a myopic view. You’re focused on your character, your accent, your costume, your lines for the day. But it was so astonishing watching it change and evolve as this piece of writing was processed through so many different hands, and mine, whether it was a costume designer, or my DP, Sharone Meir, or via restraints in a pandemic—how we shifted the entire production from India to Indonesia. Everything was surprising, I guess is what I was going to say.

You were a producer dealing with budget issues, a director getting scenes made. How did that change the way you worked as an actor?

We would get everyone else’s coverage, and then the last half an hour of whatever the setup was, or at the end of the day, we’d quickly flip the camera around, and I’d run it cold a few times—which is not the ideal scenario. The sheer physical demands of trying to maintain a physique and keep that amount of choreography crammed in your brain—these are things where if you’re caught not concentrating for a moment, you’re going to get a whack in the face. So it was just pure adrenaline for about nine months. I felt like a man possessed.

And you did accrue some broken bones on set.

I wasn’t quite Jackie Chan, but broken hands, some broken toes, and torn ligaments.

Our first big fight scene was in this bathroom sequence. My hand broke on the first or second day of that shoot. I found a doctor online that was putting screws into bones in Jakarta. We managed to get a [medical] jet so that the insurance company wouldn’t red flag it as breaking our [COVID] bubble. I came back to work the next day and we carried on. It was a way to avoid having this cast put on my hand because we wouldn’t be able to afford painting it out. A baptism by fire.

You’ve worked with brilliant directors over the course of your career. Did you phone a friend for any pointers, or were there specific techniques that you’d picked up?

I think by osmosis, naturally, I’ve been really influenced by these amazing directors that I’ve worked with. Danny Boyle is an absolute force of nature, and you probably feel a lot of his influence in this film. David Lowery—when you get to the latter, more spiritual, slightly tangential sections, my experience on Green Knight with David seeped in there. Garth Davis, who directed Lion, is a very dear friend. He came to the rescue in my edit period because we’d been picked up by a studio, and they were trying to turn the movie into something that it wasn’t. He was instrumental in watching the cut and really helping me out when I was absolutely pulling my hair out.

It’s a political movie; it deals with religion—how did you deal with making sure that it remained the film that you were trying to make?

I always knew, from day one, that I was using the genre of action as a Trojan horse to expose an audience to a world that they never would’ve really experienced before. I wanted to access that John Wick audience, or the guys that watch the Raid movies.

The central villains of the film are political, religious figures. This is happening around the world as we speak, conflicts regarding religion and land. I started the process with a Gandhi-like approach, and by the end of it, I was more Malcolm X.

You’ve called the film an anthem for underdogs.

It’s in its DNA, from the stories of the process—from being a movie that got dropped by a studio, and the financier was bankrupt mid-shoot, to winning South by Southwest.

Representation is such a loaded word, but I wanted to make a film for young Dev, the kid that grew up watching Bruce Lee films and yearned to exist in a certain film that I never had the opportunity to. And I wanted to fill it with other actors from India that don’t even get a shot out there because maybe their skin’s too dark and they’re not considered the typical leading men and ladies, but are incredible thespians. So to have Universal and Jordan swoop in, it was really an incredible moment.

Trans people are often underrepresented in film; was India’s hijra community always central to the idea of what the film would be?

I’ve always been struck by the hijra community. You’ll sit in a rickshaw and you’ll meet them walking the streets, begging between cars. With a film that’s talking about religion too, there’s such beautiful iconography that is so open-minded and ahead of its time in terms of talking about the duality of self—that we all possess a masculine energy and a feminine energy, and that those things can coexist beautifully.

Enter the Dragon was a gateway into acting for you. What other films, action and otherwise, fed Monkey Man?

I’m a huge Jim Carrey, Rowan Atkinson fan—so those more physical comedy moments, like bouncing off the window or escaping on a three-wheeler tuk-tuk. It’s like, what’s the equivalent of Mr. Bean’s car meets the Batmobile? That’s what the tuk-tuk is. Another big influence on the film is Wong Kar-wai’s work, particularly In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, if you see the kitchens and wok fire. There’s a heavy element of voyeurism in the movie, and I think Wong Kar-wai does loaded looks better than anyone in cinema.

Speaking of the little getaway car, you yourself are a fan of tiny vehicles.

I have a Mini Cooper in Australia, and then I have a 1970s Fiat 500, an old Cinquecento, which I converted into an electric vehicle. The aesthetics of old motor vehicles—the shapes, the color, even the paint—they’re beautiful, and they feel more unique than the stuff that’s on the road right now. It makes you smile when you see it, especially when you see a six-foot-two Indian guy origamied inside.

Are there genres besides action that you feel pulled toward in the future?

I have a little development first-look deal, and we are spinning a lot of plates at the moment. I have a lot of projects in deep development, a few that are ready to go, one that I’ll potentially direct next year. It’s tonally very different. But for me it’s less about the genre and more about what I’m trying to say with it. All of these things are an extension of myself, in a way. People are going to be like, “Wait, we expected another bonkers action movie, and he’s doing…”

You semi-recently made a short film called Roborovski, about the littlest hamster in the world.

I was bored in Australia, and we came across an animation company there, so I quickly cowrote the script with my [romantic] partner, Tilda [Cobham-Hervey], and John Collee, who cowrote Monkey Man. It was about a hamster in a pet shop that doesn’t get chosen. It’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing; at night he goes on these little action missions to take out the more appealing alpha predators, the other animals in cages and fish tanks, in the hopes of being chosen. It was very silly.

It’s all feeding into trying to acquire the vocabulary and mental tool kit to be able to do Monkey Man. The animation was the idea of framing and understanding rhythm and editing, and you get more control and you get to shot-list with an animation. In a weird way, doing a little, tiny, budget 2D-animation action sequence can really inform you when you get to the big leagues and you’ve got a dozen testosterone-fueled stuntmen charging at you. How do you cover that in the right way?

Do you think Hollywood is open to risk-taking? There’s always hand-wringing about the reliance on IP, the reliance on sequels. How do you think about that?

I’ve happily been oblivious to all of those politics. Monkey Man was something where I made something outside of the system and just marched along with it and didn’t accept no for an answer. The idealist in me likes to think that there’s always room for fresh perspectives and new stories.

My teenage self would beat me over the head if I didn’t ask you about Skins. Looking back, do you feel like that experience prepared you for the career to come?

Well, Keziah…! Skins was like—oh boy, it’s kind of like the little rash that won’t go away. No, no, no. Look, man, it was amazing. You look at the guys that have come out of that—Nick Hoult, Kaya Scodelario—[and] it’s really amazing. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I was plucked off of the street to be in that thing. We all stay in touch. And without it, there would be no me in Slumdog, without Danny Boyle’s daughter being a fan of Skins. All of these things, even up until Monkey Man, they’re lily pads.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For fashion and beauty details, go to VF.com/credits.