Adeel Akhtar on Showtrial season 2, living in a camper van and the importance of being seen

He is now one of this country’s most in-demand actors, which suggests the gamble paid off. Since his breakout role in 2010’s Four Lions, he’s appeared in a string of acclaimed television shows including Sherwood, Utopia, Unforgotten and Sweet Tooth. In 2017, he became the first non-white person to win a BAFTA television best actor award for his role in Murdered by My Father, and in 2022 received another BAFTA nomination for his role in the acclaimed romantic drama Ali & Ava.

We are meeting in a north London photo studio to talk about his latest primetime role in Showtrial, the second series of the BBC legal drama, in which he plays defence solicitor Sam Malik, tasked with representing a police officer (Michael Socha) who stands accused of murdering a climate-change activist. "I’ve definitely cornered the market in being the dishevelled lawyer or police investigator,” Akhtar says. "The parts I get asked to play are usually ones where the idea of them being dishevelled is usually in the stage direction somewhere."

The question bubbling across the five episodes of Showtrial is whether the activist’s death was an accident or something more sinister. The issue of police malpractice is rather timely, and I ask Akhtar if he has ever had any run-ins with the police. "I’ve been stopped and searched," he says, "then they realised I had nothing on me."

A more frightening interaction took place when he flew into New York to start at drama school but was arrested by the FBI after being mistaken for a terrorist. "It was a terrifying thought as to what could have happened to me," he says. "There were nightmare stories of people who just never went home from America. They were just stuck there and then sent to Guantanamo."

That experience of being singled out brought back unhappy memories of being a small boy and having stones thrown at him, wondering if that was always to be his life. Akhtar grew up in a village in Buckinghamshire, his Kenyan mother and Pakistani father having met while they were both working at Heathrow Airport. They first settled in Hounslow in west London and sent him to boarding school, Cheltenham College, to give him what they thought was a quintessential English education – except that Akhtar never felt he was quintessentially English.

Was it traumatising, I ask, to have to leave your parents, aged 11, for boarding school? "When you’re a kid I don’t think you acknowledge what trauma is," he says, "but I do remember being a minority in that school, and not having many people that looked like me. Now I’m 43, it makes me wonder how that affects a person’s development if you’re always seen as a minority."

His parents sent him to a fee-paying school with good intentions but now he has children of his own (he has two sons with his documentary director wife Alexis Burke), Akhtar is not convinced about the merits of public school. "My kids go to a state school," he says. "You send your kid to a school to be educated but also to give them an understanding of the world. I think going to state school better equips a kid to understand that you’re going to be entering a world where people are different but you have a commonality with them."

Whatever his later misgivings, it was at Cheltenham that Akhtar was given the opportunity to focus on acting. There was a role as a gravedigger in Hamlet and a production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming he staged with friends. "I felt like people were really listening to what I was saying," he recalls. "There was an inherent power in this profession."

He had not felt seen on screen or stage growing up, not until he came across the work of Hanif Kureishi. "I read The Buddha of Suburbia and saw My Beautiful Laundrette," he recalls. "Until then, the stories that we were allowed to see of ourselves on TV were siloed in the idea of culture, religion, or something quite issue-based – this was the first time that I felt myself reflected."

Akhtar continued with acting on the side, while following his father’s wish that he study law – two parallel roads that converged in the autumn of 2002 when he was given that opportunity to study at The Actors Studio in New York. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss. “I confronted him and explained that this was what I wanted to do, and he became emotionally absent,” he recalls. "He couldn’t stop me, but at the same time he was just really worried, because the idea of becoming an actor is terrifying."

Those worries seemed to be justified when, after leaving drama school, he drifted from one bar job to the next. "I was going out a lot and having a bit too much fun," he says, "and then the fun stopped being fun." In 2009, Chris Morris cast him in Four Lions – a role that would end up transforming his career. But Akhtar’s career did not immediately take off and he spent more than a year living in a camper van.

"At that time you could just park up anywhere, so I would park outside my mates’ houses," he says. When he needed to shower, he’d go to a yoga class to use the facilities. His parents must have been worried and disappointed? "We were estranged," he admits. "We just weren’t around each other that much."

Gradually – and then suddenly – Akhtar’s fortunes changed. Television roles in dramas like The Night Manager alongside Olivia Colman and film roles like Victoria and Abdul with Judi Dench culminated in that 2017 BAFTA, which made history. “It was just a very confusing feeling,” he says now about the win. "I couldn’t not acknowledge the work that I’d done, but it was also a bittersweet feeling because it was off the back of a lot of other unacknowledged people."

Six years later he won another BAFTA, for his supporting role in the first series of the BBC’s Sherwood, and found himself at the awards ceremony sitting behind Meera Syal, who was being presented with a BAFTA Fellowship. "It was a moment that would have been unimaginable for me when I was watching TV as a teenager," he says. "I was silent. It was beyond words."

The increased visibility of actors from diverse backgrounds and the greater range of roles he was being afforded made it easy to believe the old battles had been won. It seemed a long way from the days of his youth, when he remembered his mother using her body as a barrier to protect him from being attacked by racists. And then, this summer, he turned on the TV to see race riots erupting across the country, with mosques and hotels housing refugees attacked. "It felt like a replaying of history," he says.

"After I had stopped being sad and depressed I thought about my kids, and I wondered, ‘What can I can do to protect them from this and make them feel like they’re an agent for change?’” He took his children for a walk to their local street market. "People say this doesn’t work – the project of multiculturalism," he says, "but it works more often than it doesn’t and if you believe that it doesn’t work then they’ve kind of won." The more he reflected on the riots, the more it brought him back to his work and the impact of the acting choices he has made, and that led him back to Showtrial and what appealed to him about the series.

"The stories I am drawn to," he says, "are a complete rejection of thinking that somebody can objectify you to the point where your own humanity becomes invisible to yourself. Acting can be a vehicle for some kind of change, even if it’s not revolutionary change. There’s a gradual soft power to this work – you enter in a space where everybody feels that they’re seen."

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Showtrial will return to BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 6th October.

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