Suraj Sharma, the Life of Pi actor who chose the chair beside the lead

Suraj Sharma

Photo: Sean Reynolds from Liverpool, United Kingdom / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 21, 1993 New Delhi, India
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Life of Pi, Happy Death Day 2U, Million Dollar Arm
Awards	Saturn Award · Filmfare OTT

Suraj Sharma learned to act and learned to swim on the same film. He had gone along to an audition in Delhi because his brother Sriharsh was trying out, and he came out of the process as Pi Patel, the boy who shares a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi. Nearly everything he has done since answers the question that part left hanging: what does a teenager who carried an Oscar-winning film almost alone do next, when nobody, him included, is sure he is an actor at all?

His answer has been to take the chair beside the lead. On American television he has played the nephew of a terrorist commander in Homeland, the hacker best friend in God Friended Me, the bar owner at the centre of a group of friends in How I Met Your Father and, most recently, a financial analyst who traces money toward terrorism in The Night Agent. It is a career built sideways. It is also more deliberate than it looks from outside.

The family roots are in Kerala, though he was raised in New Delhi, the city where he was born on 21 March 1993. His father, Gokul Churai, is a software engineer from Thalassery who also plays chess competitively; his mother, Shailaja Sharma, is an economist from Palakkad. He went to Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and had no acting experience when Lee’s casting team came to the city. “I really didn’t have any sense of direction back then,” he told The Quint years later. “I was a lost cause. A lost kid.”

Lee picked him from roughly 3,000 young men after several rounds of auditions, and said he chose him for his eyes and an innocence the role needed. Preparation meant swimming lessons, since he could not swim, and months of shooting in a giant water tank in Taiwan, playing most scenes opposite a tiger largely created by computer. Life of Pi opened in 2012 and won four Academy Awards, including best director for Lee. Sharma was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award and won the Saturn Award for best performance by a younger actor.

Then he went back to class. He returned to his philosophy studies at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and later moved to New York for a fine arts degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I was only trying to focus on my school education, trying to complete my studies and doing films during my holidays,” he said. The holiday work was not small. In 2014 he joined the fourth season of Homeland as Aayan Ibrahim, a medical student in Pakistan pulled into the orbit of his uncle’s militant network, and played Rinku Singh in Disney‘s Million Dollar Arm, the true story of two young Indians recruited as baseball pitchers through a reality-show contest by an agent played by Jon Hamm.

India kept calling in a different register. In Prashant Nair’s Umrika, which won the World Cinema Dramatic audience award at Sundance in 2015, he played Ramakant, a village boy who sets off to find the older brother who left for America. His Hindi studio debut came with Phillauri in 2017, opposite Anushka Sharma and Diljit Dosanjh, as Kanan, a young man made to marry a tree to break an astrological curse who finds the tree came with a ghost. He was frank about why it took so long: “Nothing really panned out in Bollywood. Either there were scheduling issues, or I didn’t really like the roles being offered here.”

The American network years followed. From 2018 to 2020 he was Rakesh Singh, the hacker who helps an atheist podcaster track a mysterious social media account in the CBS series God Friended Me. He turned up as Samar Ghosh in Christopher Landon’s horror sequel Happy Death Day 2U, and led Danish Renzu’s The Illegal as Hassan, a film student in Los Angeles who drops out to work in a restaurant kitchen when his family’s money runs out.

Here the pattern invites a fair criticism. Across a decade of American work, Sharma has mostly been the Indian friend, the Indian nephew, the Indian specialist: functional parts that widen a cast without carrying its story. How I Met Your Father, his biggest American platform, put him in the main cast as Sid, but the Hulu sitcom built around Hilary Duff drew mixed reviews and was canceled after two seasons. Sharma himself rejects the label usually stapled to careers like his. “I have a problem with us Indians being considered actors of colour,” he said. The trouble is that American television has mostly hired him through exactly that category, and his credits there read like it.

The strongest counter-argument came from home. In Rahul V. Chittella’s Gulmohar, a Hindi family drama about a household packing up the Delhi house it has lived in for decades, he played Aditya, the son of Manoj Bajpayee‘s character, trying to build something outside his father’s shadow, with Sharmila Tagore as the matriarch. The film went straight to Disney+ Hotstar in March 2023, and the role earned him the Filmfare OTT award for best supporting actor in a web original film. It was a supporting part again, but one written with an inner life, and he made it count.

The current run is busier than at any point since Pi. The third season of Netflix‘s The Night Agent, which premiered on 19 February 2026, brought him in as Jay Batra, an analyst who uncovers financial activity linked to terrorism. In Jennifer E. Montgomery’s psychological thriller This Tempting Madness, inspired by a true case, he plays Ajay, brother of Mia, the young woman played by Simone Ashley who wakes from a coma with her memory broken and her husband under arrest; the film premiered at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in November 2025 and reached American theaters and video on demand through Vertical on 12 June 2026.

Next is Days With Dandekar, Leena Pendharkar’s dramedy starring Iqbal Theba as a man who loses the job he held for more than 35 years and sets out to recover the 1989 Volvo his family traded away. The film has wrapped in Los Angeles and has no release date yet. It is another ensemble, another chair beside the lead, and the most telling detail may be that Sharma, who once admitted he was “still not sure I can act,” keeps choosing rooms where the work is shared.

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Tags: actors, The Night Agent, Life of Pi, Manoj Bajpayee, Ang Lee, Suraj Sharma

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