Adeel Akhtar and the Long Work of Playing the Men Britain Misreads

Adeel Akhtar

Photo: Soccer Aid for UNICEF / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 18, 1980 Hammersmith, London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Enola Holmes, Enola Holmes 2, The Big Sick
Awards	2 BAFTA · British Independent Film · Emmy

Adeel Akhtar tells the start of his acting life from an airport runway. The plane taking him to an audition in New York was steered to a remote stretch of tarmac at JFK, officers came aboard and told him he would be handcuffed, and for four or five hours they asked whether he had links to terrorist organisations and whether he was a practising Muslim. A security tip-off had mistaken him for a man on a watchlist. He answered every question and went to the audition anyway.

He has said that experience shaped the roles he chose, and his career reads like a long reply to that interview room. He has played a would-be bomber, a father who kills his daughter, a widower who turns violent and a doctor chasing a cure at any cost, the kind of parts British screen drama usually writes as threat or punchline. In his hands they become people you recognise, and British television has paid him back with prizes it rarely hands to an actor it first met as comic relief.

The son of a Pakistani father and an Indo-Kenyan mother, Akhtar arrived in Hammersmith, west London, on 18 September 1980 and was educated privately at Cheltenham College. He took a law degree at Oxford Brookes University before turning to acting, and the detention at JFK happened in 2002, on the trip to audition for the Actors Studio Drama School at The New School in New York, where he went on to train. Back in London he learned the trade on the fringe, starting at the Half Moon Theatre in the East End, which later made him its patron.

The film that made his face known turned the airport scenario into farce. In Chris Morris’s Four Lions (2010) he was Faisal, the most naive member of a Sheffield cell of would-be suicide bombers, the one who proposes blowing up a branch of Boots because it sells contraceptives. Comedy kept calling: Maroush opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator, Smee in Joe Wright’s Pan. Television drama saw something else. Wilson Wilson, the paranoid conspiracy theorist of Channel 4’s Utopia, brought his first BAFTA TV nomination, and he followed it with DS Ira King in River and Rob Singhal in the BBC’s The Night Manager.

The turn came with Murdered by My Father, a single drama written by Vinay Patel and shown by the BBC in 2016. Akhtar played Shahzad, a widowed father raising two children who murders his teenage daughter when she falls for a boy other than the man she has been promised to, then takes his own life. The film keeps the audience beside him to the end, and Akhtar plays a loving, frightened man crushed by shame. It won him the 2017 BAFTA TV award for best actor. He was the first non-white performer to win that category.

The years that followed were his widest. He was Naveed, Kumail Nanjiani’s older brother, in The Big Sick; Mohammed, the companion who sails to England beside Ali Fazal’s Abdul in Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul; Inspector Lestrade in both Netflix Enola Holmes films; the Maharajah in Adam Sandler‘s Murder Mystery. Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava gave him a lead. As Ali, a music-loving Bradford landlord who meets Claire Rushbrook’s Ava at the school where she works, he carried a love story through an estate’s racism and both families’ suspicion. It won him the British Independent Film Award for best actor in 2021, ahead of Riz Ahmed, Stephen Graham and Jude Law, and a BAFTA film nomination for leading actor the following year.

Two more prizes came in 2023. In Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, which ran for three seasons to 2024, he played Dr Aditya Singh, a doctor desperate to cure his infected wife, and won the Children’s and Family Emmy for outstanding supporting performer. In James Graham’s Sherwood he was Andy Fisher, a shy widower in a Nottinghamshire mining village whose loneliness ends in violence and a manhunt, and that part brought a second BAFTA TV award, for supporting actor.

The prizes make the record look neater than it is. Many of the roles that made him circle the same territory of suspicion, shame and violence: the comic bomber, the honour killer, the hunted man in the forest. The usual reading is that Akhtar subverts those types by humanising them, and the performances bear it out. The less comfortable one is that the industry kept offering a British-Asian actor the same ground, and his gift for making it humane made those offers easier to send. Ali & Ava remains the only film built around him; the bigger studio work tends to use him as a reliable supporting face, a Lestrade or a Maharajah. The stage has given him range the cameras have not. As Lopakhin in Benedict Andrews’s in-the-round The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse, opposite Nina Hoss, he was the performance critics singled out in a production they argued over.

He has kept busy. He played DS Sami Kierce opposite Michelle Keegan in Netflix’s Harlan Coben thriller Fool Me Once and the prime minister, Richard Eaves, in the Netflix spy drama Black Doves, both in 2024. The Cherry Orchard transferred to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2025, and that autumn he was Hamza, a shadowy government man, alongside Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson in Apple TV’s Down Cemetery Road. In January 2026 he told the JFK story on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. From April to June he was back at the Donmar as Jay, a grieving father who sits across a table from the parents of the boy who killed his son, in the first stage version of Fran Kranz’s Mass, directed by Carrie Cracknell. Critics split on the play; one found his Jay angrier and edgier than the screen original.

That work has two more stops ahead. Simon Stone’s Elsinore, with Andrew Scott as the actor Ian Charleson and Akhtar in a cast that includes Olivia Colman, Billie Piper and Johnny Flynn, opened the 70th BFI London Film Festival on 7 October 2026; it reaches US cinemas in a limited release on 20 November and UK cinemas on 29 January 2027. In September he joined The Ministry of Time, a six-part series for the BBC and A24 adapted by Alice Birch from Kaliane Bradley’s novel, as Quentin Ackerly, the Ministry official who acts as handler to Aoife Hinds’s Sophy. The series is filming for a 2027 release. After the room at JFK, he gets to play the man on the official side of the table.