Dev Patel has likened himself to a "celery stick".
Dev Patel
The 26-year-old actor believes starring in 'Lion' and meeting the film's director Garth Davis "changed him completely".
He said: "I always felt like a goofy celery stick ... I was a tiny twig, with short hair. Completely different to what Garth [Davis] changed me into.
"Garth would say, 'We need to make you more alpha and get your facial hair growing.' So I moved differently, I felt differently in my clothes and all these kind of things."
And Dev also opened up about some of the preparation he did for the role including travelling around India and pretending to be a monkey.
He told The Independent: "I went to India a month before I had to do my first shot and it was travelling the train and writing a diary of my feelings. I went to these orphanages and then you sit down afterwards and have to write down what you're feeling and that is when you digest it properly.
"I wrote a piece in my diary about the word hero, because you know the Bollywood stars when they are in public in India people call them hero, so they would call out hero to me, and I'm like, I wrote this thing in my diary about feeling less like a hero than ever before ...
"[We did] bizarre exercises ... With Rooney [Mara] he made us do a monkey exercise to build tactility. Where we could only communicate with each other as monkeys. There was lots of hippy stuff that Garth put us through."
And Dev also admitted he took eight months to perfect his Australian accent for the movie.
He shared previously: "A lot of effort is what it took. Eight months of effort in fact with the genius of a dialect coach from Sydney, Jenny Kent. I was really lucky that the production gave me that comfortable lead up to take that time to do that."
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