Part of Lost featuring Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Jorge Garcia, and Terry O'Quinn.
Rise to Fame
He got thrown out at 16 by a father who hated the idea of acting, and walked straight into Guildhall alongside Ewan McGregor and David Thewlis. The English Patient in 1996 put him in an Oscar-winning production as Kip Singh, the Sikh sapper. Lost made him a household name. Sayid Jarrah, an Iraqi former interrogator with a dark past, premiered in 2004, right in the middle of the Iraq War, and the character carried a weight the writing alone couldn't account for.
In the Spotlight
Post-Lost, he stayed visible in prestige TV without finding another role with that level of reach. The Dropout (2022) on Hulu changed the conversation. Playing Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, the Theranos COO who was later convicted of fraud, opposite Amanda Seyfried put him back in awards territory for the first time in years. He's been a series regular on The Cleaning Lady on Fox through 2024. The career didn't stall so much as drift sideways, waiting for parts that matched what he's capable of.
Side Notes
The maths teacher who took him in at 16 later had his first child. He's spoken openly about spending roughly two years addicted to alcohol and heroin in his mid-twenties, collapsing on set before getting sober in the US. His parents, both immigrants from Kerala who arrived in Britain in 1965, died before he could reconcile with them. He's spent 30 years playing morally complicated outsiders on screen. Turns out the character work wasn't much of a stretch.