Bafta was 'bitter sweet moment' for star Adeel

BECOMING the first nonwhite person to win a best actor Bafta was “bittersweet” for Adeel Akhtar.

- BY TONY WHITFIELD

Despite being overjoyed at winning the gong in 2017 for Murdered By My Father, a BBC drama about an “honour” killing, it jarred that so many great British Asian actors had gone unrecognised before him.

Adeel, recently seen starring in Down Cemetery Road alongside Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson on Apple TV, told Desert Island Discs he had to play stereotypical roles such as a bumbling Muslim extremist in Chris Morris’s 2010 dark comedy Four Lions when starting out.

It was only when he played Wilson Wilson in Channel 4’s 2014 conspiracy theory thriller Utopia, for which he was nominated for a best supporting actor Bafta, that he was able to put those roles behind him.

He said: “I felt a freedom in characterising a role that wasn’t super-reliant on my culture, my race, or anything like that.”