Shortly before the holidays in 2024, Emma Thomas — producer, Christopher Nolan‘s wife and the keeper of his secrets — met Himesh Patel in London and handed him a physical copy of a screenplay. No emailing, no secure digital upload. Just a script, passed across a table. “That’s how he does things,” says Patel. “It’s a very covert operation.”

That script, it turned out, was for The Odyssey, Nolan’s much-anticipated, gloriously overstuffed $250 million adaptation of the greatest adventure story ever told — gods, monsters, wine-dark seas and all — with a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Matt Damon and a shooting itinerary that stretched across six countries on three continents.

Of course, this wasn’t Patel’s first time working with Nolan, though the circumstances with Tenet, in which the 35-year-old actor had a small role as an arms dealer, couldn’t have been more different. For that 2020 time-travel thriller, he received audition sides from Ocean’s Eleven and didn’t see a page of the real screenplay until he arrived on set in Tallinn, Estonia. Even then, they only gave him his own character’s scenes. “He has a sort of in-house mentality with the people he works with,” Patel says of Nolan. “I had a lot of fun on Tenet and got on really well with him, and I think that has a lot to do with it. He certainly doesn’t need to ask anyone back.”

Patel grew up in a small village in the middle of England, performed with The Young Actors Company in Cambridge and turned professional at 17 — spending the next nine years playing the quiet, bookish Tamwar Masood on the British soap EastEnders. His first big break came in 2019, when he scored the lead role in Danny Boyle’s Beatles-inspired rom-com Yesterday. “In a sense, it was baptism by fire,” he says of the film, “but it didn’t feel like fire because I had so much support.”

In the years between Tenet and The Odyssey, Patel appeared in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up — as Jennifer Lawrence’s boyfriend, no less — and earned an Emmy nomination and a SAG Award for his work in HBO’s Station Eleven, the postapocalyptic miniseries. He was unaware that either the show or his performance was in the awards conversation until the nominations were announced. “Now that I’ve learned how awards work — all the campaigning and effort that goes into it — I do feel proud that it was more meritocratic for me.”

The Nolan call came at an anxious moment. Patel had been waiting for word on whether HBO would renew The Franchise, the superhero-production spoof in which he starred alongside Daniel Brühl, Billy Magnussen and Lolly Adefope. When his agents reached out, he assumed that’s what the call was about. It wasn’t. The Franchise cancellation came a few weeks later. “A real shame,” he says — not just for the show, which he thought was good, but for the cast, with whom he’d become close friends.

The television gods, as it happened, had other plans. He’s currently in Vancouver shooting Ryan Coogler’s long-awaited X-Files reboot (he’s Zooming in wearing a Pacific Northwest-appropriate fleece). He’ll be joined by Station Eleven co-star Danielle Deadwyler — the two never shared screen time on that series because their characters existed in different timelines, but they met on the Chicago set six years ago and have stayed in touch. He can’t say much, including whether he’ll occupy the Mulder role or the Scully. “There’s a wall just outside Ryan’s office,” he says, “and they took Polaroids of all of us, and we had to define ourselves as skeptics or believers. I wrote that I’m a believer — but only one time out of 10.”

When it comes to The Odyssey, in which Patel plays Eurylochus, Damon’s second-in-command, he can reveal slightly more. For instance, Nolan insisted that his cast use American accents rather than Greek or British. It was the largest production Patel has ever worked on, and he was surprised to find nearly every scene and stunt shot was in-camera with practical effects. It meant spending weeks on a boat in the open ocean, an Imax camera affixed to an adjoining ship and another beaming down from a helicopter overhead. He spent another week in a cave in Greece, then shot from the top of a castle while the cast climbed a mountain over and over.

“This is implied with every job,” Patel says, “but it’s most pressing when a director trusts you to be their guy: Don’t fuck this up.”

So far, so good.

This story appeared in the June 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.