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Since his breakout role in comedy hit Four Lions, Adeel Akhtar has been a mainstay on British screens.
The 45-year-old actor has provided representation for millions over the years, from his history-making Bafta win as the first non-white male to ever win the lead actor award (a victory he calls ‘late in the day’) through to his back-to-back thrillers with projects like Black Doves andSherwood.
But his now thriving career hasn’t always come easy (he’s previously spoken about auditioning out of the back of a van, even after Four Lions blew up).
As a Brown man growing up in the UK, his early experiences have been shaped by his identity, as he told Metro in a chat ahead of his episode on BBC series Who Do You Think You Are.
‘When I was a teenager, I went to a predominantly white boarding school, that was a bit tough, just trying to work out your racial and cultural identity in a space where you had to work it out for yourself before you presented it.
‘Even the jobs that I got were quite narrow sometimes, and were a little bit stereotypical in some ways,’ he shared.
Feeling like he had to tell his stories a certain way, like ‘a template you have to adhere to’, in his late 20s and early 30s he ‘thought there was an idea of who I had to be, or how I had to present myself.’
Refusing to be pigeon-holed, however, he continued: ‘That was an obligation that was put on me by the industry, but you have to be self-determined in the idea of who you are and what you represent.’
Over a decade on, he’s found far more agency over the types of roles he gets to play.
‘I’m finding more and more that we’re in a space where we can allow ourselves to be a bit of a soupy mess of experiences more than we ever could before, and that’s coming from a place of having to minimise certain parts of myself and trying to navigate going through the world,’ he reflected.
Before diving headfirst towards the future, he’s first delving into his own past to uncover the complex history of South Asian migration – and how exactly a boy with a heritage spanning the Indian subcontinent and East Africa wound up born and raised in London.
Although seldom represented on screen, Akhtar’s heritage is a common story for many of the South Asian diaspora living in the UK today, a modern-day consequence of Britain’s brutal colonial rule across vast swathes of the world.
For Adeel, he was starting this journey with the basics. He knew he had an Indo-Kenyan mum, Mumtaz, who arrived in Britain aged 16 to avoid an arranged marriage and eventually met his Pakistani father (hailing from Bahawalpur) while they were both working at Heathrow Airport.
Despite visiting Nairobi at various points in his life, where some of his mum’s side of the family still live, much of his ancestry is shrouded in mystery, once more a familiar tale for most second and third-generation immigrants.
Thus, in his new episode of Who Do You Think You Are, he sets out on a quest to unravel the mystery of his past, and maybe just shed light on his present.
‘My mum was basically just trying to survive, you know. There is that thing coming from the diaspora, where you’re not really afforded the space to really share the story of migration because you have to crack on with it.
‘You have to just make sure that your kids are fed, and you know you’re going to work. Just to be able to revisit this story in the way that I have was a real gift to my mum as well.’
And exploring his Indo-Kenyan roots was all the more special for how little this thread of migration is spoken about.
‘Even in the UK, when you think about Pakistan and India, you don’t have to travel that far to know about the British Empire and Partition and the wave of immigrants that came over in the 60s, but the East Africans were a big part of that wave as well.
‘I’m always asking my mum and her side of the family: “You guys look Indian, so how is it that you ended up there?” And they’re able to tell me bits of information, but not really scratch that itch.’
Travelling back to Nairobi, he uncovered just what battles those who came before him faced, including systemic racism and attempted apartheid.
But also how they were the leaders of those pushing for change and, in one particularly moving moment, how his great-great-grandfather set up the all-girls school his grandmother eventually attended.
‘Whether it was my mum or my mum’s mum, or her father, through the generations, there was always this movement, this idea that they would come up against some really harsh obstacles, and no matter what the obstacles were, they essentially overcame them,’ he said.
But the thread that connects them all, to the present day as Adeel sits in his South London home with his own family, is this sense of community and looking after one another.
He also has nothing but awe for his mum’s determination to build a good life for him and his sister.
Humble as ever, when I point out the impact his career has had on representation for British South Asians – especially with projects like Murdered by My Father and Ali and Ava, he took the compliment with grace.
‘I feel really privileged if that is the case and I hope it is. I’ve never really said this before I’m a product of immigration. I’m a product of people having struggled to get to where they are.
‘I look at how I have been afforded the opportunity to do what I’ve done and that’s through the hard work of my mum, my dad. I look at my mum and I just go: “oh, I hope I’m doing it some justice.”‘
He hopes that, if anything, his career can inspire others to ‘keep telling their stories’ just as he’s been motivated by South Asian trailblazers like Hanif Kureishi (the writer behind the Oscar-nominated My Beautiful Laundrette).
‘[His work] lit me up in a way because he was just unapologetically himself, had his perspective on the world, and would only ever express himself through that perspective of who he was.
‘But within that, he managed to wrap up really, really complicated questions of cultural identity, or what it meant to be an immigrant,’ he reflected.
Still, as he wades through the questions over his identity, and what his heritage means to him, he’s still having plenty of fun digging his teeth into genres like thrillers where he can ‘give into your fantasies and just run around a bit.’
As he explained: ‘It is a departure from the real world, so I do enjoy it for that, especially the Black Dove stuff. Somebody gets blown up and they get up and just brush themselves off and walk off again. That’s kind of a nice world to be in sometimes.’
Adeel Akhtar’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are premieres at 9pm on BBC One tonight and will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·