Dev Patel and Monkey Man: An Actor Takes Control of the Story
Revisiting his 2024 directing debut through the roles, creative opportunities and collaborations that helped shape his path to filmmaking.
When Monkey Man arrived in 2024, it added a new responsibility to Dev Patel’s screen career: directing a feature. The debut gave him greater influence over the story surrounding his performance, extending his creative role across the production.
The film sits within a career that has moved through family drama, literary adaptation and Arthurian fantasy. Those earlier roles provide useful context for Patel’s decision to construct an action vehicle of his own, with authorship becoming part of his work as a leading actor.
Finding room for different characters
Patel won the supporting actor BAFTA for Lion in 2017. In his acceptance speech, he connected the film with family and love across borders, while thanking young co-star Sunny Pawar and director Garth Davis. The speech located his achievement within a larger collaboration.
Three years later, discussing The Personal History of David Copperfield in a Sight and Sound interview, Patel described the importance of viewers recognising themselves on screen. He recalled that an accessible version of Dickens’s story had been missing from his own childhood.
He also explained how long it had taken to find the kind of substantial role that Lion offered after Slumdog Millionaire. These were his reflections in 2020, before Monkey Man. They give the later move into directing a meaningful context: an actor discussing the limits of available opportunities would eventually help originate a feature himself.
The question also concerns what audiences can take for granted. A performer can belong within a classic adaptation while opening it to viewers who previously felt distant from its world. Patel’s account of recognition gives that idea a practical significance: a familiar face can bring a familiar book closer, changing who feels invited into the story.
Entering a different kind of legend
In David Lowery’s The Green Knight, released in 2021, Patel played King Arthur’s nephew, setting out to confront the mysterious visitor of the title. The role placed him at the centre of a story inherited from Arthurian legend.
That casting expands the range of worlds a leading performance can inhabit. A familiar literary tradition can be approached through a different face, voice and physical presence. Following Patel between projects becomes an invitation to move between genres, with his presence providing a thread through markedly different stories.
That makes The Green Knight a useful companion to Monkey Man, while leaving each film’s cultural sources and dramatic intentions distinct.
Originating the action
Universal’s official credits identify Monkey Man as Patel’s feature directing debut, based on his original story, with a screenplay written alongside Paul Angunawela and John Collee. Jordan Peele was among its producers.
The studio describes a protagonist who survives through underground fighting before pursuing the powerful people connected with the violence of his childhood. It also identifies the legend of Hanuman as an inspiration. These elements establish the project’s combination of revenge narrative, social hierarchy and myth.
Those credits mark a change in creative responsibility. Acting interprets a character; directing also shapes the surrounding world, from the rhythm of encounters to the perspective guiding the audience.
The shared screenplay and production credits place that expanded authorship within a collective effort.
A debut within an established career
At the 2025 BAFTA Film Awards, Patel received a nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer for Monkey Man. The distinction is a useful marker: an established screen actor could still be recognised for beginning a different professional practice.
Awards offer one record of that transition. The work itself invites a broader consideration of how a career develops when the performer also starts shaping the premise, structure and production of a film.
Seen from that perspective, Monkey Man remains an instructive chapter in Patel’s career. Lion, David Copperfield and The Green Knight show the variety of characters he had interpreted. His 2024 directing debut adds another dimension to that history: a leading actor participating in the creation of the world his character occupies.
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