Naveen Andrews

Actor

• Born: January 17, 1969
• Place of Birth: London, England

Contribution: Naveen Andrews is a Golden Globe–nominated English actor best known for his roles as Kip in The English Patient (1996) and as Sayid on the television series Lost (2004–10).

Background

Naveen William Sydney Andrews was born on January 17, 1969, in London, England. He is the oldest son of Indian immigrants who had moved from Kerala to South London in the mid-1960s.

Andrews knew he wanted to become an actor by the time he was a teenager, and he fought bitterly with his father over his choice. Reflecting on his difficult childhood in interviews, especially the tumultuous relationship he had with his parents, he has said that he sympathizes with the difficulties they faced in raising children in a foreign environment.

When Andrews was sixteen, he was thrown out of his parents’ house because of the escalating violent confrontations between him and his father. Andrews was taken in by his mathematics teacher, Geraldine Feakins, who became his guardian and with whom he fell in love. She would have their son, Jaisal, in 1992.

In the late 1980s, Andrews auditioned for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he became famous among his classmates for dating his former math teacher. His acting debut came during this time, in Hanif Kureishi’s play My Beautiful Laundrette (based on the 1985 film version). Andrews graduated from Guildhall in 1990.

Career

Andrews’s relationship with Kureishi proved fruitful. In 1991, he gave Andrews his onscreen debut as a minor character in the film London Kills Me. The next year, Andrews played a Pakistani country singer in the BBC sitcom Wild West, though the role was small and did not garner Andrews much notice. In 1993, he again teamed up with Kureishi in The Buddha of Suburbia, a BBC miniseries adaptation of Kureishi’s novel. Andrews starred as a half-English, half-Indian teenager in London during the 1970s.

In the early 1990s, soon after splitting up with Feakins, Andrews developed serious alcohol and heroin addictions. Nevertheless, he was able to stop using heroin long enough to work on a job. In 1996, Andrews was cast in what would turn out to be his breakthrough role as bomb-defusing Kip in the Academy Award winning film The English Patient, based on the 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The film’s director, Anthony Minghella, had known about Andrews’s use of alcohol before working with him. He sternly warned the actor to cease all such activity as long as he was on the set, and except for several minor relapses, Andrews was able to comply.

Later in 1996, Andrews went to India to play a womanizing monarch in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. Because of the film’s sexual nature, the crew was forced to work under the appearance of making an innocent family film, as Indian censors kept them under continual watch and would have stopped production had they discovered the film’s explicit content. During the shoot, Andrews ingested so much alcohol that he collapsed on set and required medical attention. The actor would not be able to leave his addictions behind until 2003.

In 1998, Andrews was hired to play Dr. Abraham Verghese in the Showtime film My Own Country. The plot centers on the life of the Ethiopian-born Indian doctor and his time spent in rural Tennessee treating patients with HIV and AIDS. Also that year, Andrews starred alongside Bill Paxton in Mighty Joe Young, a remake of the 1948 film about a mountain gorilla that is brought to Hollywood.

Two years later, Andrews was cast as Somen Banerjee, the creator of Chippendales, in the 2000 television film The Chippendales Murder. The next year, Andrews worked for the first time on American television in the short-lived drama series The Beast. In 2002 he acted in his first American film, a widely panned remake of the 1975 science fiction film Rollerball.

Andrews’s film and television work up to this point had yielded no significant success, and neither Andrews’s face nor name had attracted much critical notice. In 2004, however, Andrews received the role for which he would become famous, when he was cast as Sayid Jarrah on the ABC drama series Lost.

The show’s overarching plot revolves around the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 after it crashes onto a mysterious island. Andrews’s Sayid Jarrah is a former interrogator and torturer for the Iraqi Special Republican Guard. He must work with numerous other survivors to combat the island’s supernatural forces.

Lost was a critical and commercial success, with more than eleven million viewers tuning into the pilot episode. Andrews portrayed Sayid Jarrah for the entirety of the show’s six-year run, making him a star and one of several fan-favorite characters. He also earned an Emmy Award nomination in 2005 and a Golden Globe nomination in 2006; the entire cast, including Andrews, won the 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for best ensemble. The show’s highly anticipated series finale aired in May 2010 and drew a viewership of more than 13.5 million.

While Lost was still on the air, Andrews acted in several films. In 2007 he played Abby in Robert Rodriguez’s horror film Planet Terror, one-half of the Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double-feature collaboration Grindhouse. Later that year, he played Jodie Foster’s fiancé in the thriller The Brave One.

After Lost concluded in 2010, Andrews guest-starred in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He joined the main cast of the English action-adventure series Sinbad in 2012, but the show was canceled after one season. Andrews next signed on to play the English-Pakistani heart and lung surgeon Hasnat Khan in the biopic Diana (2013), about the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. In 2013 he also signed on for the role of Disney villain Jafar in ABC’s Once Upon a Time spinoff series, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. The show proved short-lived, however, airing for a single season.

Andrews next played Jonas Maliki in the ensemble science-fiction drama Sense8, which ran on Netflix from 2015 to 2018. He then costarred as intelligence officer Julian Cousins in the CBS crime drama Instinct, which aired from 2018 to 2019. In 2019, he was cast as the lead in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a film adaptation of the Gabrielle Zevin bestseller by the same name.

In the 2020s, Andrews was again on television screens. In 2022, he appeared in the miniseries The Dropout and the series The Cleaning Lady.

Impact

Though Naveen Andrews worked on an almost continuous stream of films and television from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, he received little international exposure or attention until he was cast on Lost. Andrews has lamented that he has been typecast for his Indian heritage. Despite this, he has been widely praised for his acting abilities and continues to enjoy critical respect.

Personal Life

Andrews dated actress Barbara Hershey, twenty-one years his senior, from 1999 to 2010. They briefly separated in 2005, at which time Andrews had a child, Naveen Joshua, with actress Elena Eustache. Andrews became an American citizen in 2010. He also has a son, Jaisal, from another relationship.

Bibliography

Elsworth, Catherine. “‘I’m So Grateful I’m Sober Now.’” Telegraph. Telegraph Media, 30 Aug. 2005. Web. 22 July 2013.

IGN Staff. “Grindhouse Interview: Naveen Andrews.” IGN. IGN Entertainment, 5 Apr. 2007. Web. 22 July 2013.

"Naveen Andrews." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0004710/. Accessed 23 Sept. 2024.

Roberts, Genevieve. “Naveen Andrews: ‘At Least I’ve Been a Good Parent.’” Independent. Independent, 1 July 2012. Web. 22 July 2013.

Saner, Emine. “‘I Was Seen as Either a Junkie or a Drunk.’” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 22 July 2013.

Wilkes, Neil. “Naveen Andrews (Lost).” Digital Spy. Hearst Magazines, 12 Feb. 2008. Web. 22 July 2013.