Dev Dundee: Slumdog Millionaire Star Breaks Up Fight Between a Couple Outside a Store in South Australia
- British Indian actor Dev Patel intervened in a violent altercation where a woman stabbed a man in the chest in Adelaide.
British Indian actor Dev Patel is in the news this week, not for a stellar on-screen performance, but for an off-screen act of courage. The Oscar-nominated actor tried to break up a fight in Adelaide, Australia, where a woman stabbed a man in the chest, news reports said, citing police and his reps.
The “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Lion” star lives in Australia with his girlfriend, actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey. On Aug. 1 late evening he was at the scene “when a couple’s fight took a dramatic turn at a gas station,” 7NEWS reported.
The man, 32, and woman, 34, had been fighting in the street and continued quarreling inside a convenience store, according to a press release from South Australia Police. There, witnesses, including the 32-year-old Patel, “tried to break up the dispute that eventually spilled outside.” The man was rushed to the hospital and is expected to survive, the press release said. The woman was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. She was denied bail and was due to appear in court on July 3, 7News reported.
Patel’s Netflix-backed directorial debut “Monkey Man” is currently in post-production.
Patel’s reps confirmed to 7NEWS that he tried to intervene in the stabbing. Photographs of him speaking to authorities at the scene were also released. “Dev acted on his natural instinct to try and de-escalate the situation and break up the fight,” they told 7NEWS. “The group was thankfully successful in doing so, and they remained on site to ensure that the police and eventually the ambulance arrived.”
However, they insisted that although he put his safety at risk as he tried to help, there were “no heroes” in the frightening incident. “This specific incident highlights a larger systemic issue of marginalized members of society not being treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” the actor’s reps told the station.
Patel was last seen in David Lowery’s “The Green Knight.” His Netflix-backed directorial debut “Monkey Man” is currently in post-production. He’s also set to star opposite Benedict Cumberbatch and Ralph Fiennes in Wes Anderson’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” also backed by Netflix.