The Man Dev Patel

In the eight years since he broke out in the Oscar blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire, Patel has built quite a résumé, working with M. Night Shyamalan and Aaron Sorkin to name a few. But with this month’s drama Lion, the 26-year-old emerges as a full-grown force.

- Rachel Reilich

With the same sparkling enthusiasm he exudes on-screen, Dev Patel, stylishly rumpled in an olive green linen button-down, Acne Studios blue jeans, and beat-up tan leather Cole Haan oxfords, eschews the comforts of the sumptuous sitting room inside the well appointed Los Angeles home where we just wrapped up our photo shoot. Instead, he opts to sit outside, where he spots Boomerang, the resident cat, walking across the lawn. “Hello!” he shouts. “Come and join us.” The cat, no doubt drawn in by Patel’s charisma, instantly obliges. The actor’s buoyant mood contrasts sharply with his role in Lion, a profound, emotional drama in theaters November 25. He plays Saroo Brierley, a young man raised in Tasmania who, with the advent of Google maps, becomes obsessed with finding his Indian family of origin. Scenes with co-stars Nicole Kidman (who plays his adoptive mother) and Rooney Mara (his on-screen girlfriend) are deeply affecting, but it’s Patel’s solitary moments, in which he must reveal a whole range of human feeling to a lifeless computer screen, that will truly captivate audiences. “It’s the hardest performance I’ve had to do,” Patel confesses, leaning back on his hands. “It required a level of stillness, a kind of comfortableness, that took a while to get.”

In Lion, your character, Saroo Brierley, develops a somewhat unhealthy, if wholly understandable, obsession with Google Earth. Have you ever fallen into an Internet K-hole?