Adeel Akhtar was living in a van, wondering if he should move back in with his parents. It was 2010. He’d recently appeared in Four Lions, the Chris Morris satire, in which he plays a Muslim extremist who, in an uncanny set of events, blows himself up in a Yorkshire sheep field. The film had been successful. (The New York Times called it “stiletto sharp”.) But it did not immediately become the career tipping point Akhtar hoped it might. So there he was: 30 years old, not well off, suffering after the break-up of a “messy” relationship, recording audition tapes from his van. The work had dried up, but he wasn’t hustling. Even when he got a gig, he sometimes wouldn’t bother learning his lines. “What is that?” he asks now. “Why would a person not apply themselves?” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I suppose a not-nice way of looking at my younger self is that I was lazy.”
Akhtar does not seem lazy now. A few days before we meet, in a mid-market café near his south London home, he won Best Actor at the British Independent Film Awards, for his role in Ali & Ava, a Clio Barnard film about forbidden love. Akhtar plays Ali, a British Asian man – irrepressible, distressed, permanently on the edge of euphoria or breakdown – who falls for an older white woman. The film is set in and around the housing estates of Bradford, and across social and racial divides. At the awards ceremony, Akhtar praised Barnard for presenting ordinary lives as extraordinary, and for “looking at people who are traditionally overlooked”. This was important, he said, particularly for him, because, “I’m one of them.”
