In Dev Patel’s new thriller Monkey Man, his character the Kid earns his living in an underground fight club in an unnamed Indian city. Wearing a monkey mask and going by the name “the Beast”, he’s beaten bloody in the ring every night by bigger, stronger opponents. It doesn’t matter, the Kid is working towards something bigger: revenge.

It’s a story inspired by the Hindu deity Hanuman, the god of wisdom, strength, courage, devotion and self-discipline – and it’s a story Patel was told by his grandfather many times.

“Growing up in Greater London, I was someone that sort of ran away from my cultural heritage,” says Patel. “I didn’t want to be bullied. I wanted to fit in, all of that. But every once in a while my granddad would fly in from Kenya and tell me the stories of the Ramayana [a Hindu epic] and then I was like, God, this is so cool.

“They stuck with me. And even when you go to India, you’ll see dangling on every mirror in the cars these Hanuman little trinkets and you’ll go to gyms and see [pictures of Arnold] Schwarzenegger, this bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman and Hanuman in the gyms and he’s the embodiment of nobility and strength and courage.

“For me, when I dove into those mythologies as an adult, I was like, ‘Wow, the story of young Hanuman is exactly like Icarus [the Greek mythological figure who flew too close to the sun].’ We could be talking about the caste system, we could be talking about all these things, but at its core, he’s an underdog, he’s an outsider.”

The 33-year-old Brit is talking over Zoom from Los Angeles. It’s just a week or so after Monkey Man, which he also wrote and directed, premiered at the South By Southwest festival in Texas to a standing ovation and won the audience award. For Patel, the reaction has been overwhelming.

“There’s a lot of insanity involved in this process,” he says. “I think everyone within a 10-foot radius of me probably thought I was insane at one point or another. But I am a huge fan of the action genre. I’m a consumer of it. I was just desperate to see a story like this, with substance and culture and vibrancy and bombastic action, and just through all the trials and tribulations and bumps and whatever, it was a joy.”

Patel has been a familiar face in Australia for many years, living in Adelaide with his Australian girlfriend Tilda Cobham-Hervey during lockdown, which is where they met when filming Hotel Mumbai in 2016. He also filmed Lion here, with Nicole Kidman, which scored him a best supporting actor nomination at the 2017 Academy Awards. But apart from an appearance in Wes Anderson’s short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Monkey Man is his first big-screen role in a few years, and he doesn’t waste a moment.

It is a film so thrilling and violent – with Patel inventively using every kitchen implement he could lay his hands on in one scene – that as I was cowering in my seat, the security guard checked to see if I was OK. (I was, eventually). It’s bonkers, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it for days, wondering from where quietly spoken Patel had channelled so much rage.

“It comes from having salmon, lettuce and sweet potato three times a day for nine months,” he says, laughing. “That will get you that kind of rage.”

He jokes he’s created a new breed of hero – his tall, lean frame not quite the burly builds you usually see in this genre. “Toothpick action hero,” he says. “We inquired about the budget of airbrushing my face onto Chris Hemsworth’s body, but it was out of our price bracket.”

At a base level, Monkey Man is John Wick in India – Patel even wears a suit and befriends a puppy (if you know, you know) – but it also pulls from Bollywood and Korean action cinema, with a training montage that would make Rocky sweat (and sent the audience wild at South By Southwest in the scene where Patel ripped his shirt off).

“I wanted to put my own stamp on things and do things my way,” says Patel. “I’m a huge fan of action cinema spanning from Bruce Lee to Jet Li to Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen. You know, Iko Uwais from the Indonesian Raid films, then you’ve got John Wick and all the Korean auteurs that have made the best revenge films with guys in cool suits, brooding action heroes. So I’m kind of tipping my hat to all of those guys and standing on all of their shoulders.”

With Monkey Man though, Patel has very much carved his own path. He’s thrown everything at it – Hindu mythology, police corruption, a thrilling high-speed rickshaw chase and a soundtrack that even includes Phil Collins. He paints India as a country where obscene wealth rubs shoulders with extreme poverty. A country where sectarian violence, which triggers the Kid’s quest for revenge, has resulted in death or displacement of thousands. It is not, in other words, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or Slumdog Millionaire.

“I just wanted to make a film that had some substance, you know,” says Patel. “We’re showcasing some of the most vibrant parts of the culture – the classical music, this legend, Zakir Hussain, who taught with the Beatles and Ravi Shankar, and the hijra [eunuch, intersex, transgender people] community and the beautiful parts of the mythology.

“I didn’t want to shoot a tourism video. I wanted to talk about things that do fill the columns of the newspapers there – violence against women, religious tensions, the mass monetisation and weaponisation of religion and politics and the caste system and all of those things.

“But that’s not just an Indian kind of problem, we are facing that [kind of violence] here in America, in London and all over the world, sadly.”

In the film, that violence – albeit fictional and choreographed – did come at a cost. Before and during filming in India and Indonesia, Patel broke several bones and ignored doctor’s orders to lay off the rough stuff.

“Two weeks before production, I got my foot stomped on,” he recalls. “I broke a couple of toes, which sounds minuscule, but when you’re doing action, having those toes broken was very painful. And then, during the first action sequence in the bathroom, I broke my hand and that was really tough, production was basically going to grind to a halt.

“So I told my DP [director of photography] and my producer, I was like, ‘Don’t tell anyone, let’s just film and get the rest of the day in’ and my hand swelled up to the size of an elephant foot. And then we went on this private plane, to keep this COVID bubble alive, to this hospital in Jakarta and they put a screw in my hand, and the doctor was like, ‘If you put any pressure on this hand, more than two pounds [just under a kilogram] of pressure, you’re going bend that screw, and it’s going to be like pulling a bent nail out of wood, and you’re going to ruin your bone.’

“I was like, ‘Totally, copy that’ and then we went straight back into the action. And we shot everything. It was madness. You can see on the film, sometimes I’m wearing a bandage and the hand is puffier and it’s all there for everyone to see.”

For a first-time director, Patel had a crack everything, shooting one car chase on his iPhone, and basically living out his dream, filming complicated fight sequences where he was the centre of the action.

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“The performer in me wanted to [do it],” he says. “It’s the pauses between the action, it’s the reactions, it’s the way you take a hit. That, for me, is where action lives and becomes drama. And so, at the beginning, it’s comedy action when he’s less prepared, not as in tune with his instrument, and then when we get to a place where he’s learned to harness his emotions, he becomes this great avenger character.

“He’s steelier and can move more fluently, and we hold the camera throughout those sequences. There’s one whole sequence where I fight these men in an elevator with knives and it’s three men and a camera operator – without cutting – in this tiny elevator, trying not to smash the lens. It took 21 takes to nail, but it was so much fun to do.”

How was he at the end of each day’s filming? “I was aching in places that I never knew you could ache,” he says, laughing.

For Patel, one of the great joys of Monkey Man came after filming had finished. It had originally been sold to Netflix, and was heading straight to streaming with no cinema release. It was then that uber producer Jordan Peele of Get Out fame stepped in – and gave Monkey Man its second chance with a deal at Universal and a big-screen release.

“You know that scene in Pretty Woman when she gets turned away from that shop on Rodeo Drive?” says Patel. “I felt like that [rejected] and then in comes Richard Gere, aka Jordan Peele, with [the film studio] Universal. Universal is like his black Amex card, basically – and I got to walk in that shop. It was pretty amazing.”