Dev Patel finds ‘serendipity,’ Nicole Kidman finds relatability in ‘Lion’

TORONTO – Dev Patel says he screamed like a madman to land the role of someone desperately searching for his family in “Lion.”

It was all to prove he could plumb the depths of his emotions to portray an Indian adoptee on a seemingly impossible quest, says the “Slumdog Millionaire” star, who is generating raves for his latest against-all-odds saga.

Patel can now chuckle about his determined pitch to director Garth Davis, which apparently involved a gruelling six-hour audition before the script was even finalized. But it was brutal at the time.

“The sun had gone down and before I left, (Davis) was like, ‘You know, I just want you to do one thing: I want you to scream. Just go crazy. Just let it all out. Exorcise your demons,'” Patel recalled during a round of interviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where the film had its world premiere.

“And then he put on this song that I’d been listening to on the way there … and all of a sudden the emotions came and it was just beautiful, it was like a serendipity to it. It was great, it was literally seeing (what would happen) if he broke us and put us back together. That’s what he did. And it was about being comfortable with each other to be so emotionally raw and naked.”

There was no holding back for Patel, who also transformed physically to play a beefy surfer living in Australia with scant memories of his impoverished Indian childhood.

The Brit actor says he threw everything he had into doing justice to the true story of Saroo Brierley, who was separated from his family at age five after falling asleep on a train.

Davis’s adaptation of Brierley’s memoir, “A Long Way Home,” traces his bewildering thousand-mile journey to Calcutta where the boy was forced to beg in the streets until he landed in an orphanage. From there, Brierley was adopted by an Australian family and memories of his early years eventually faded.

But they persisted just under the surface, and 20 years later, a powerful trigger brought tortured memories rushing back. Brierley was determined to hunt down his birth mother and make his way home again.

“Every young actor would dream to play a role like this. And especially for me, a young Indian dude from London, this stuff doesn’t come around everyday — this kind of cast, these kind of filmmakers,” Patel says.

“It’s truly special and I knew that when I read it, I just was allowed to explore a space and embody a character that is far, far away from the usual cliche that we get thrown. In every way it broke the mould for me.”

Rookie actor Sunny Pawar carries the first half of the film as the young Saroo, a demanding role that Davis says he supported by establishing a safe and comfortable set. Among his biggest rules for the cast and crew: no candy and no star-worshipping.

“Often when you go on a set people high five and go, ‘Hey! It’s Sunny!’ There was none of that, it was like against the law. No lollies on set, basically it was a big thing. It was all about him, the whole way we set it up was all about him. It was a very extensive process.”

Patel says he was impressed with Davis’s approach with the young cast, which included Abhishek Bharate as Saroo’s older brother.

“Garth would call cut and keep the camera rolling and that’s when Sunny would get tired and put his head on Abhishek and then you see that and that’s just raw, it’s real. You know, those moments when he’s got snot on his nose, that’s what the beauty was. He’s a very patient filmmaker, which is what made it feel so real.”

Nicole Kidman co-stars as Saroo’s adoptive mother Sue, and says she could easily relate to her real-life counterpart, noting she has two adult children she adopted during her previous marriage to Tom Cruise.

“She very much believes in destiny and she’s pretty extraordinary, but just like her speech when she said she had the vision of (adopting a) small brown-skinned child and that it all came to fruition, I think I just related to her on that level. She also has red hair and fair skin,” she jokes. “And she’s Australian. We have a few things in common.”

The incredible tale seems too wild to be true, admits Davis, but he says he strove to stick as closely as possible to the real sequence of events. He works in actual news footage of the real Saroo’s return to India to introduce his birth mother to his adoptive mother.

“A lot of people don’t even believe (it). They go: ‘This is too far-fetched.’ I’ve been in some research groups where they go, ‘Oh, surely someone would have helped him.’ But they didn’t,” he says.

“I’m just presenting the story as I understand it.”

“Lion” opens Friday in Toronto before expanding elsewhere on Dec. 21.

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