Akbar Kurtha
Akbar Kurtha is an actor, born 1970.
Kurtha was born in St Pancras in 1970 and has been working on British screens for more than thirty years, which in practice means he has been in the room for a lot of the country's television about itself. The early films map the period: Bhaji on the Beach in 1993 and My Son the Fanatic in 1997, both part of the run of British cinema that put South Asian British life on screen with some seriousness, then Esther Kahn in 2000. Television made him familiar as Dr. Rana Mistry in the BBC soap Doctors.
The career since has been the specialist supporting one. Syriana gave him the biggest platform, as Prince Meshal Al-Subaai, a role inside a film assembled out of overlapping power, and House of Saddam put him inside the regime as Kamel Hanna. He is very good at the man who holds a position: a doctor, a detective sergeant, an executive, someone with a title and a professional register to hide behind.
Sometimes the typing gets comically literal. He plays a pharmacist in both Maniac and A Street Cat Named Bob, four years apart, in two films that could hardly be less alike. The recent run is British drama at its most current: Small Axe, Liar, Playing Nice, Paris Has Fallen, and Sebastian in 2024. He produces as well as acts.
Movies (5)
TV (6)
Where to start with Akbar Kurtha
The single best use of him is Syriana, where he plays Prince Meshal Al-Subaai and gets something rare for a character actor: a scene in which the power in the room is genuinely his. It also shows the thing he does better than almost anything else, which is speak with authority in a register that never rises.
From there, Small Axe and House of Saddam are the serious television, one a portrait of Black British life and the other a regime drama, and between them they show his range across two completely different institutions. Liar and Playing Nice are the domestic thrillers, Paris Has Fallen the action one, and Mars the oddity, a docudrama about a Mars mission where he plays Dr. Jay Johar.
For the joke, watch Maniac and A Street Cat Named Bob back to back and notice that he is the pharmacist in both.