When Dev Patel made his on-screen debut as awkward teenager Anwar in Skins in 2007, he had no acting experience whatsoever.
He probably never expected to become an Academy Award-winning, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominated Hollywood star and one of the UK's biggest exports.
Born in Harrow to a care-worker mother and an IT consultant father, Dev achieved an A* in his drama GCSE and decided to audition for E4 series Skins, a show that would propel its stars, including Nicholas Hoult, Jack O'Connell and Daniel Kaluuya, to international fame.
Dev's mum had seen the casting advert in Metro and took him to the audition even though he had a science exam the next day.
"She told me I was going to bunk off school to attend," he told Esquire.
"I’d never done anything like that before, so I thought she was insane and we had this massive argument.
"When you’re 16 you don’t want to be pushed out of your comfort zone."
After two auditions, Dev, now 31, was cast in the role of Anwar Kharral, a British Pakistani Muslim teenager who was written specifically for him and based on his own personality.
On the first day of shooting, Dev was totally lost and told the The Telegraph he "didn't really know what to do," not versed in how filming worked and confused by the microphone.
He used comedy as a self-defence tactic, telling The Guardian : "The bigger and goofier you are, the more willing you are to be stupid, the more laughs you get from your peers – and the less likely you are to be bullied for being 'that guy fresh off the boat', or whatever.
"I’d throw every emotion at it: happy, sad, melancholic – all there in one line."
Dev's breakthrough came in 2008 with the leading role of Jamal Malik in Danny Boyle's drama Slumdog Millionaire, for which 19-year-old Dev was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, becoming one of the youngest nominees in the category.
He won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
He also began dating his co star Freida Pinto, and the pair were together for the next six years.
But it was in 2016, when Dev was cast as Saroo Brierley in Lion opposite Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara, that Dev suddenly transformed.
He grew a beard and beefed up for his role as the Indian author who was separated from his family as a young child and eventually adopted by Australian parents, before finding his childhood home on Google Earth and being reunited with his family.
Dev admitted it was not easy gaining so much weight for the role of Saroo, who was a sports lover, completely assimilated to his life in Australia.
To prepare for the role, Dev spent months alone in India travelling by train, visiting orphanages, meeting with Saroo’s Indian and Australian families, to help him form what he called "a truthful memory map".
"It was eight months of pushing weights and eating like a glutton," he told Access Hollywood Live.
"But I had to do it because the real guy is very sporty and I'm a little wafer, so it was very difficult."
He also told the New York Post : "It was about putting on weight — not to get muscles or anything like that, but to have a different physicality on screen.
"To feel more like an Aussie."
Dev then had to change his physique drastically again after Lion wrapped, switching out his muscled look for a more slender one for his next film.
"It's called Hotel Mumbai, about the terrorist attacks that happened in 2008 in India," he explained.
"I just play an average every man."
But this would unlock a new fanbase who were utterly in love with Dev, who has been described as interviewers as "modest" and a little shy about the attention.
After this initial success, Dev had expected more parts to come knocking for him - but he found he was being typecast as a "goofy sidekick" character with an Indian accent.
He told The Guardian he felt a similar thing had happened to Freida - while she was landing huge Hollywood roles, she tended to play an "exotic beauty next to all these Caucasian leading men".
But when Dev was cast as David Copperfield, he was baffled to learn he was playing "basically Charles Dickens".
He told The Guardian he initially turned down the role, afraid his ethnicity would distract viewers if no explanation was offered as to why the character wasn't white.
But similarly, Dev had so often been cast as Indian characters when in fact he is British.
He recalled feeling he was "not British enough to be fully British" but "not Indian enough to be fully Indian".
More recently, Dev was cast to play Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, in the soon-to-be released film Green Knight.
The film's director, David Lowery, told The Guardian: "I sought an actor whose side the audience would immediately take, no matter how unlikeable his character might be."
He added to the New York Times that Dev's legion of lusty fans were not the reason for his casting.
"I’m certainly aware of all of the fans of Dev Patel’s hair and beard — I’ve seen those memes," he said.
"But I don’t think people understand exactly what he’s going to be doing as an actor, and The Green Knight just scratches the surface of it."
In the same interview, Dev said of the role: "For me as a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success, and fame. That’s the same quest my character goes on to be a known knight."
Dev currently resides in Adelaide with his girlfriend, Australian actor Tilda Cobham-Herve, who he met on the set of Hotel Mumbai.
A fan who recently spotted them and stopped for a chat told the MailOnline: "He was very accommodating and so was Tilda.
"She was sweet and quiet and they were so loving towards each other."
But Dev stays away from social media and deliberately keeps his personal life private.
"I’m old-school," he told Time Out.
"I’m trying to be an artist. People will believe in me more the less they know about me."
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