Adeel Akhtar - The importance of staying true to yourself

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0:35Hello and welcome to How To Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. In my podcast, we look at and celebrate our unique individual failures because ultimately they're the stepping stones to success. Every week, I invite a guest to look at their failures and what has come afterwards that might have helped them grow and succeed. And before we get into my interview with Adil Akhtar, I'd love for you to join me afterwards at Failing With Friends, my subscriber series, where I will be continuing my conversation with him. It's our chance to hear from you, and it's where we discuss your failures and any questions you might have.

1:12I really look forward to you joining us, and I would love to hear from you. If you'd like to get in touch, follow the link in the podcast notes. Get Failing With Friends episodes every week and all episodes of How To Fail completely ad-free. Just visit the How To Fail show page on Apple Podcasts and click Start Free at the top of the page to begin your free trial. Or you can visit howtofailpod.com if you're not an Apple user.

1:45If you've been blown away by a piece of television over the last few years, the chances are pretty high that it featured Adil Akhtar. Perhaps you watched his BAFTA winning performance in Sherwood playing a hapless accidental criminal who killed his son's wife, where Akhtar carried out the impossible trick of making you root for his character. Maybe you've seen him in Back to Life or The Night Manager, or perhaps you were one of the 90 million viewers of Netflix's Fool Me Once, and you saw Akhtar playing a rumpled detective experiencing unexplained blackouts. When I watch him, it's as though he reaches into the heart of what it is to be human and squeezes it.

2:30Now he's taking his talents to the stage, about to appear in the Don Mars new production of The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov's Russia is far removed from Akhtar's own upbringing. Born to a Pakistani father and a Kenyan mother who met while working at Heathrow Airport, he grew up in a Buckinghamshire village where he recalls having stones thrown at him as a child. He went to boarding school in Cheltenham, then began a law degree before dropping out to retrain at the Actor's Studio Drama School in New York. His breakout role was as a bumbling Muslim extremist in Chris Morris' satirical movie Four Lions in 2002.

3:10Fifteen years later, Actar won the lead actor BAFTA for the one-off BBC drama Murdered by My Father. Astonishingly, he was the first non-white actor to take the gong. And although these days his career is clearly in the ascendant, he seems never to take that success for granted. When he was once asked about the most important lesson life had taught him, Akhtar replied that it's never completely amazing and never completely terrible. More often, it's all right. Adil Akhtar, welcome to How to Fail. Thanks. Wow. Where are we on that spectrum today of amazing, terrible and all right? Yeah, all right, I think.

3:52It's just that's what we've got a gun for, really, isn't it? Yes. Do you know what I mean? And with that delivery. We're all right. We're all right. Yeah. I also think there's something really profound about expectation wrapped up in that. Because if we simply expect things to be all right rather than unadulterated bliss every second of the day, we actually end up being happier. Yes. It's a sort of pressure to sort of live from your joy. Especially now when we're sort of made to feel like there's not much that we should be complaining about. There's been lots of improvements in sort of the world and, you know, mortality and all these sorts of things.

4:34But there's a lot more complications as well. And so we have to, I think we've just got to gun for all right, because then when you do, those moments of joyous bliss sort of catch you as opposed to it being this sort of continuum of feeling. Let's talk about imperfection. Okay. Because I was chatting to you before we started recording about how I watched Sherwood on a long-haul flight and how your performance, thinking of it even now, has the capacity to make me well up. It was such a heartbreakingly astonishing performance, for me anyway. I don't know what it was like for you. And I think what you do so beautifully in all of your characters, whether you're making us weep with empathy or piss ourselves laughing, you manage to uncover something about the flawed nature of trying to do your best.

5:36Can you relate to that? Is that where it comes from? I can relate to that because I think the thing that really grabs my heart is people's reach for something. and that sort of endeavour always either makes me really laugh because it's mismatched. You know, people in a particular state, you know, and they're sort of reaching for something that's beyond them and sometimes that can be quite funny and other times it can be heartbreakingly tragic. It's people's effort in trying to be better. It's the gap between the yearning and the getting. Yeah, and that liminal space that we're all in. I read this book and this author was sort of describing yearning and love.

6:24And he used this analogy of like an open horizon. And yearning is travelling in a boat and going towards the horizon, but nothing orientating you. Just keep on going, keep on going. And love, oh, I feel like I'm going to wear myself. Love being something that orientates you, something that you aim for. When you won your BAFTA for your performance in Sherwood, Yes. You said in your acceptance speech that it felt a little bit like a miracle. Yeah. Why did it feel like that? I suppose I was sort of comparing myself to when I first started acting, when I first started looking at becoming an actor or when I was a kid watching TV for the first time, you know.

7:01And I just maybe a few days before come back from an event celebrating Mira, she won the sort of fellowship, the big old award. Mira Sayal. Mira Sayal. it was like another ward just to be like that was a BAFTA fellowship I think and I had just come back from that maybe like a few days before and I was in this wave of sort of being in a room full of lots of brown people who are just really high up and producing and channels and Netflix and all just across the board and so to for all of us to be in that room together and then as I was accepting that speech, just seeing Mira in the front row there.

7:43I mean, it was very much, it felt very miraculous. Yeah. Yeah. Fool me once. Yeah. Massive stonking hit. It's gone well. It's gone well. It's gone pretty well, hasn't it, Adele? Oh, yeah. That sounds, yeah. Where is your starting point when you get a script and you're asked to play a character? What's the first thing that you do after reading the script in order to prepare? Yeah. When I first started, I thought there was a lot of work involved in having to sort of characterise something. And not that there isn't a lot of work involved, but I used to burden myself with a lot of stuff that I'm not sure was very necessary.

8:28But now it's something that's very sort of right-hitted. I don't have to travel too far to find where the emotional truth is of that character because I just go, well, I'm just going to do my version of that and I hope that's all right. Right. So you find the emotional truth and then you tap into an experience of that same emotion in your own life and bring that to the same. Sure. I went to a sort of very sort of Methodist school. And I think when I was young, I thought there had to be an emotional equivalent to, you know what I mean? Like sort of living the part of the character. And now I realise that, you know, once I sort of step back from that a little bit, there's ways of tapping into a character where you don't need that.

9:10lived experience of that particular character. I have an equivalent area of understanding that can still serve the character. Is Michelle Keegan really lovely? Oh my good God. What a lovely woman. Lovely, beautiful. Such a lovely, beautiful. Great coach. There was a whole TikTok thing about her coach. I saw, I saw. Yeah. She was the first person to arrive on set and last person to leave, generally because she had so much to do and not once did she not smile and was ready to chat and ready to be a bit silly just a wonderful person to work with talking of that feeling of a sense of miraculous occurrence when you got your BAFTA and you looked at Mira Sayal and you saw it reflected back to you reminds me of a story from your life that seems like it would be scripted Yeah.

10:02Which is when you were flying to New York and you were mistaken for an extremist. Yeah. And shortly afterwards, that's when you got the role in Chris Morris's Four Lions. Yeah. Can you tell us that story? Yeah, sure. My girlfriend at the time was auditioning for drama school in New York and she said, do you want to be my scene study partner just to help her out for the audition? So basically when you're a scene study partner, you have your back to the audience, but you're sort of making that person shine. But as I was flying over to do that, in Heathrow, they took my passport and they said, I'll get it returned back to me when I arrived at JFK.

10:43When I arrived at JFK, it was like sort of convoys of vans, FBI sort of people coming out and then handcuffed and then questioned and then later released and then did the audition. came back and was going to start my LPC my legal practice certificate sort of thing and it was and then the drama school phoned me up and said would you like to take a place at this drama school and I I went with my girlfriend we just ran we ran away we just were like this is this we went back to New York and I took a place at that at that drama school but that was my sort of introduction to New York and that sort of quite harrowing part of it they thought I was somebody that I wasn't I have quite a profound understanding on that now because you know my job is to enact lots of different types of people and on those characters that I've had to play there's always the tension between somebody who's trying to limit that person in some way it takes a lot of self-reflection and sort of self sort of analysis to really be in tune with the person who you are in the world and to present that to the world and to stand by it even when you're under duress you know there's something about that story that is so chilling and I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for you yeah at the center of it because it's about lack of agency and lack of control and you've done such a profound job of expressing what that means to you as a person but I also imagine that it's so difficult being in a situation where there's just no recourse sure it must have been horrible yeah it was horrible because you're trying to express an actual truth about yourself and that truth is being not believed but there's no higher stakes situation because if that person doesn't believe that truth that you're trying to say then I mean we're talking about times of Kautama and stuff like this looking back on it the states couldn't have really been higher what it taught me was to draw parallels between that and how people are in the world anyway and it makes the thing that you experience which was like you said really difficult and painful and scary makes it less difficult and less painful less scary because we've all got our own versions of that you know you hold that space for someone and go that's a really intense complicated painful situation to being when all you're trying to do is be yourself but you're okay you know it does explain so much about how you get audiences on side in spite of a character acting in ways that are not immediately sympathetic or that seem outright horrifying in other contexts because you manage to convey on some level that the character is in conflict with the truth of who they are and and there's something so beautiful about being drawn back like a tide because of your flaws and imperfections and you're constantly trying to be better and yet you're denying what makes you you at the same time which is absolutely the premise of this podcast sure that is so much better to be honest about our flaws with the little bit of writing i'm doing at the moment this thing is just always coming into my brain it's like creating space and holding space and so often we're sort of told to fill that space with ideas and words and our opinions opinions you know and sometimes it's cool just to write down your opinion fold it up put it in your back pocket sit on it for a bit and just create space for yourself to work out whether that opinion is worth sharing in that moment or not let's get on to your first failure yeah which is failure at school what was your upbringing like in that buckinghamshire village where you had stones thrown at you yeah so we I was initially born I was born in Hounslow and then mum and dad moved to the suburbs because it was just a sort of nicer home with a garden and things so that's what we did when I was young and then my mum and dad wanted the sort of best education they could get for me and they worked really hard and saved a lot of money to send me to sort of private school and eventually went to a boarding school in Cheltenham.

15:31This sort of common thread through all that was just being sort of minority and yeah the sort of stone throwing thing was looking on it and charitably could have just been kids messing around being kids looking up my experience back then at the very least I go oh that's strange you know what I mean without having to sort of draw up a massive draw you know write a massive essay on it or anything that's it's a bit weird you know yeah I totally understand that in certain respects in the when the me too movement happened for women, I definitely looked back at my life and thought, well, I'm lucky because I've never been the victim of any form of sexual harassment and definitely not assault.

16:17So I'm fine. And then actually I looked at what other people were saying me too about. And I was like, oh no, I have. I mean, I've experienced that, but so much of it was an expectation that there was a price to be paid for admission into this world that didn't belong to me, that was run by the men. And I can only imagine how much more acute that might feel as a visible minority in your Buckinghamshire village and your private school that actually it's the institution that gaslights you it's the society that gaslights you and it takes a really long time to unpack what might have happened. Yeah I suppose so and if you're up for unpacking it as well I sort of understood that I was a minority and I understood that there's a world and institution that works in a particular way and the thing that can undercut all that is to find the thing that you love work out the thing that was always there which is like oh I've got this desire to communicate with people and want to find connections with people.

17:30But you felt you failed at school. Oh, yeah. So talk me through the elements of that failure, because you must have felt a sense of responsibility as well. Your parents had worked so hard to earn this money to send you to this prestigious private school. Yeah. What happened? These are the people who I always gravitate to anyway. It's like the people who sort of outliers. So I was just not very good, just not very clever at school. But you're very, very clever. Oh, yeah. So why did it, was it just not the right kind of environment? Maybe not the right kind of clever, which is fine, really. And so then from a young age, I had this sort of tension of going, well, that will keep my mum and dad very happy.

18:09And actually they've worked really hard. So there's a lot of guilt involved in pissing around. But I couldn't help not pissing around. I couldn't help, do you know what I mean? I just kept on. What were you doing? Were you smoking cigarettes and stuff like that? What was the naughtiest thing? I was very good at not getting caught smoking cigarettes. And I was very good at when I did get caught, my face looked really sorry for itself. That's your early training, isn't it? I wasn't even trying to train. I was just scared of my dad. So as soon as anybody was like, do you want me to tell your dad?

18:46I would just be like, I would just revert back to like the way my face would sit, which is like, oh, fuck, that's the worst thing in the world. yeah I remember there was a bunch of us that we sort of we found Harold Pinter, I was 16, 17 we found the homecoming, Harold Pinter the homecoming and we had this tiny little space about as big as this and we had like a light on and we put some chairs down we put a production of the homecoming on and I was listening to Arab Strap at the time this band Arab Strap and I remember when I first heard this song first big weekend of the summer it's like music is just like something when you still get turned onto music for the first time and I realized back then it was like oh yeah this is music is happening I'm really enjoying Harold Pinton I don't really understand it fully but it's great again like searching for those moments of going oh what was that I mean the other stuff in the way of that you know being a minority and like having to sort of battle against lots of things to be heard and stuff like that's you know, then and important things to reckon with.

19:54But that stuff can sort of break through a lot of the problems and complications. Did you fail your exams? How did you do? I was just really, I was that annoying person in school who's really mediocre. So I would got like C's, maybe like a few B's at GCSEs. But they made me a monitor or something. And like I got a little monitors badge. I'm not even a prefect, a monitor. And if somebody put a monitor, I took that very seriously. to the point where it was almost laughable. Do you know what I mean? I sort of knew how seriously I was taking it, but it was the first time somebody was like, here's a badge.

20:30It's like, well, guys, you know, there's no running in the corridors. So if we can... Do you think you were trying to be a bit like your dad? A little bit. A little bit, yeah. Maybe just a tiny civil servant. Not that he's a civil servant, he's a lawyer, but, you know, that kind of like... My wife jokes now that when I go to a beach, it looks like a civil servant from the 60s, just like their sort of trousers rolled up and like, why didn't he bring your shorts? You mentioned that your dad's a lawyer. Yeah. And you went to do law at university. This is still wrapped up in your first failure. Yeah.

21:05And you mentioned at the beginning that you dropped out of that law degree in order to become an actor. Yeah. How difficult was it for you wrestling with what your dad's expectation of what you should be doing might have been? My dad, his dad was a lawyer. So it's almost like a blacksmith, you know, within the Asian world. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. But not the smith part. It's just like you sort of do what you're told and you don't question it. So I remember coming back with my UCAS form. My dad essentially sort of filled it out for me. It was just like, no, you're doing this sort of thing.

21:42and then this opportunity came to just run away to New York and do this drama school stuff and he wasn't angry just shouting at me or whatever he did initially and then after a while he just kind of emotionally became absent and um for my dad that was me presenting him with something that wasn't very easily understandable and something he couldn't help me with because help was an expression of his love so he couldn't yeah i know so he couldn't uh i don't know we're both going now i don't know it's because when i watch you we've got the pink microphones we've got to have a bit of a laugh it's come on okay oh i promise we'll get into the jokey section yeah yeah sure Is your dad still a lot?

22:33Yeah, he is. He is. Okay. But all that to say, his expression of love was to help. And then he just didn't know how to love me in the right way, basically. I know now. And now we're just going to land this emotional plane. We're a lot better. We have this sort of easy understanding with each other now. And maybe it is because I'm a dad now. And because he looks at his grandchildren in a way that he realizes all he had to do was just hold that space. Just be. There was nothing to do. really you just had to sort of be there with with them and they're gonna love him like you know like i do so it's just he didn't have to do much you know so beautiful oh thank you adil is your mom great yeah she's brilliant okay okay yeah yeah moving on just quickly the thing about my mom is just she again my the life that i was living wasn't very understand easily understandable to her not very soon but she's been to see from new york tiny little uh black box avant-garde theatery world to all the things she's just been there throughout seeing every performance you know there's something again there's something deeper going on there which is like you have to work beyond your understanding of what it is that it's just always been a support you actually said something in a past interview about cultural assimilation at the level that your parents did being the ultimate act of creative expression which I've never read before and I thought it was so profound and even if they couldn't understand the choice you were making career wise maybe actually you get your talent for creativity from them in a very beautiful way that they perhaps don't see themselves but that's maybe where it's from I think so I think it's from them but it also allowed me to see that in other people i recently finished this book by this woman called elif batman yeah she wrote this book called the idiot yes and it was a funny book because she's in this book she's sort of 19 and she's disassembling the idea of like high art and literature whatever because she's because the idiot was written by dostoevsky and that's like freaking brilliant you know but she talks about this thing where um and it's really interesting that the presentation of the well-made novel to a person denies them and steals that person's receiving the well-made novel of their artistic process because in the presentation of the well-made novel what they're not allowing you to do in your process or our process is to write a shitty diary or something or write a autofiction or you know screw up the margins and there's an appetite for people now just to smash it all together you know what's good and bad and what's high art and low you know just to put it and present it and go that's the most crystalline piece of truth I can present.

25:32There's truth in the messiness. Sure.

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27:00Your second failure is that early on you had lots of failures as an actor and you were out of work for years yes and at the time it felt like in your words you were failing at life how bad did it get pretty but I mean pretty bad like I mean late 20s early 30s not working I don't know a bit depressed and a bit unhappy with it all because you know I've always believed that people's imperfections are really beautiful just trying to present all of me but it was as if the industry and my desired sort of career path didn't really want it I felt a little bit like a rejection what were you being told at auditions that you failed I mean I just wasn't getting anything and so that just went on and on and on but again like looking back on that and I'm doing a spot of writing now I think it is a kind of a really beautiful metaphor for sitting with creativity in a way you know the obstacles that you sort of find and we can sit with that discomfort because eventually we know we're going to settle in a place where the thing that we're doing is going to have an artistic expression of sorts in your life you don't know that in your life you are on that sort of that big horizon of yearning I was in that spot I was just going what's happening where am I going what's what's happening here you know what was the worst audition you ever had I mean it's not funny now and it is sort of funny but it's also a little bit like oh great now i'm thinking about i was working in new york so i had like one job where i had to put on an indian accent and i had to sit so that was like a really shit one now looking back on it it's a shit one but times have changed now i don't think anybody's gonna ever ask you to do that ever again but there was like a sort of a few of them you know where like before when you turn around you go oh that's that was weird that was that wasn't one that you'd say that was weird that was just like oh that's shit do you know what I mean yes less weird and more like oh shit but thankfully it feels like those are less and less now we're sort of entering a time where people can have got the appetite for seeing you in a sort of different way than how they once so the sort of casting or the the idea of you playing a particular type of role used to be very narrow and maybe that's the miracle thing that we were talking about when I was seeing Mira, we've sort of raised, widened our aperture of what we can see and what we are able to accept from people who we thought could only do one particular type of thing or one particular type of role.

29:43Is it true that you ended up living in a van? Yeah. So basically I had a little bit of money and I thought I could just make that last a lot longer if I just lived in my van for a bit yeah what kind of van it was an LT VW but it's not like one of those sexy VWs 90s it was like really boxy 1980s I mean if you saw me and it would have been funny because it was so massive and I'm not the biggest guy in the world so it looked like I I was driving like a heavy long goods vehicle or something. And it was all converted on the inside. And it was great. I mean, again, it was fun until it wasn't fun. Used to go to a lot of festivals.

30:27A mate of mine did this thing called Folk in a Box. We used to set up this little box in different festivals. And then you'd sit down and you'd have this one-on-one sort of folk song with this person. And I was living with the box. Were you hiding that from your parents? They kind of knew. Again, like they had this. Okay, so I've just described my mum. So my mum is the sort of woman who's sort of gone to like Worcester Street in New York and seen me do some really avant-garde theatre and try and, you know, that's more mine, but you know what I mean. And she's seen like we did this. So there's a, I think she sort of got it.

31:05She understood what was happening, but there was a deeper wisdom of sorts in her, which which was just like, is he all right? Just on a basic, is he all right? Fine, then he's fine. My dad was just like, just couldn't understand what was happening. It was like, and then because it was so overwhelming for him, he sort of distanced a little bit more going, I just don't get what's going on here. Because I was just, like most of us are, just searching and trying to find what I was supposed to do. Before we get on to your final failure, how did Four Lions come about then? Was it just another one of these auditions that you thought?

31:42Yeah, good question. I can't remember now. All I can remember is doing it and the time going by so quickly because I love Chris Morris. I loved everything that he did. At that time, it was kind of arguable whether there was any satire before him. Maybe that's pushing it. Maybe, I don't know. But it felt like that because he was just like had such a, he was just super sharp focus on the types of stories he wanted to tell. and I just remember wanting to please him and just be, just to get this thing right. I've been able to put a lot of effort into just trying to get it right. And now looking back on it, the moments of realisation where that film really worked was just the really silly bits, right?

32:26I mean, the introduction of it obviously is like, you know, young men being radicalised and on the fringes of society and disenfranchisement of young British Asian men. and that list is sort of like but really they were just being fucking silly do you know what I mean? they were just like really low to the ground holding bags and like trying to understand the reach just these people who are trying to understand themselves and the world and that's sort of funny and tragic you know all at the same time they're just trying to trying to find themselves your final failure is your failure to put things in perspective oh yeah yes I suppose in the sense that there's some things that take a lot of thought and there's other things that you don't need to think about that much I suppose that's what I mean and the benefit of age maybe means that you can be a bit discerning as to what those things are like definitely with my career I go okay there's a character I can see it and I understand where that lies in me and how I'm going to play it my failing perspective but when I was a lot younger would be like right all the research how does he walk what's his shoes does he like prawn sandwiches which is a real thing people sort of like what sandwich does he so to be with age you could sort of be a bit bit more economic with your um energy and how you invest in things and stuff do you think you have a tendency to depression oh very good question i think i did when i was in that sort a chunk of time maybe in my late 20s early 30s I definitely looking back on that now I would say I wasn't totally happy but as of late like I wouldn't I've never ever felt that level of despair and I think it's because of this ability to just be myself you know I think the through line with all this now I'm thinking about it is the moments that you feel that that anxiety the moments you feel the depression the moments you feel those really intense feelings of whatever emotions there are there's a sort of incongruity between how you see yourself and how you're trying to present yourself to the world and now I'm just sort of caught up with the fact of not having to perform any other part of myself that isn't weird and complicated you know Given your experiences of your childhood and your quest to embody the truth of yourself, that essential truth, how has having your own children changed your perspective?

35:25Has it made you more or less anxious, do you think? Somebody told me this sort of child development stage from naught to five, and it's called emperor narcissism. Have you heard of this? It's wicked, isn't it? My best friend's a therapist. That's the only reason I've heard of it. Cool, cool, cool. I love it because it suddenly makes sense of your role as a parent where this little emperor's running around and you're like, I'm so sorry. You're apologising way more than you. He's really, really terrified. I'm in a good mood today. I love that. And if I didn't have kids, I wouldn't be able to conceptualize what that is.

36:09And basically what that is, is we need to feel the center of somebody's world. But then when I look in the world and I see that not happening and there's an incongruity with people, there was something there, you know, something happened where you weren't, you didn't feel like you were the center of things, whether it's through our writing, whether it's through doing this or whether it's through our acting or whatever, whatever else you just want to go, I hope I'm making a little bit of a step in that direction for people who never did. Again, like that thing I'm saying, like a placeholder for really complicated feelings.

36:45My kids have just taught me to sort of go further and deeper in that journey, really.

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