Dev Patel calls ‘Skins’ a “little rash that won’t go away”

Dev Patel has described his stint on the beloved teen comedy Skins as “the little rash that won’t go away”.

The Slumdog Millionaire star played Anwar Kharral on the first two seasons of the E4 show in 2007 and 2008, the best friend of Mitch Hewer’s Maxxie Oliver.

It played a major role in getting his career off the ground, as he explained in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, however he also quipped that it is a show that he is constantly asked about still, despite leaving it 16 years ago.

“Skins was like – oh boy, it’s kind of like the little rash that won’t go away,” he said. “No, no, no. Look, man, it was amazing. You look at the guys that have come out of that – Nick Hoult, Kaya Scodelario – [and] it’s really amazing.”

“I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I was plucked off of the street to be in that thing. We all stay in touch. And without it, there would be no me in Slumdog, without Danny Boyle’s daughter being a fan of Skins. All of these things, even up until Monkey Man, they’re lily pads.”

Earlier this year, Patel spoke to NME about his memories of the “insane” Skins parties that he and his fellow actors would have while making the show.

After being shown a picture of himself at a party scene with fellow cast members, he said: “I’m wearing a corset with the Rocawear belt, and basically my arse is hanging out. That was a crazy day.

“They did these commercials where they’d rent out these mansions of whatever and then just a bunch of kids, our age and older, would come and half of them were drugged off their faces, and [the crew] are like, ‘just… have fun.’ It was insane. It was really, really insane.”

He continued: “I remember one of the best days of shooting they played Shy FX ‘Original Nuttah’ and they had this club scene and everyone was just going mental. I remember that because they played like 60 times and I was like a Kenyan dude in the Maasai Mara jumping up and down.”

Patel made his directorial debut with the 2024 film Monkey Man, in which he also starred as a young man who earns a living by fighting in underground fight clubs while wearing a monkey mask. After years of suppressed rage, he discovers a way to infiltrate the city’s sinister elite, and seeks revenge against the people responsible for his mother’s death.

As he revealed to NME, the shooting process was so physically gruelling that he sustained a broken hand, a couple of broken toes and a torn shoulder.

He also opened up about his current musical obsessions, which include Aldous Harding and Ben Howard.

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