Christopher Nolan’s Tenet Adds Yesterday Star Himesh Patel to Cast

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet adds breakout Yesterday star Himesh Patel to the cast. He’s become one of the most successful film directors in the world thanks to movies like The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Interstellar, and now Nolan is coming back with another huge movie project that is sure to generate enormous amounts of buzz in the coming months.

First announced back in May, Nolan’s Tenet has already headed into production and already dropped a teaser trailer that ran in theaters ahead of IMAX showings of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw but has yet to appear online. The enigmatic teaser clip, featuring star John David Washington, didn’t give much away in terms of plot (obviously) but seemed to promise that Nolan is once again setting audiences up for a mind- and time-bending experience a la Inception. In addition to Washington, the film’s cast includes Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Dimple Kapadia and Kenneth Branagh, together with Nolan’s long-time good-luck-charm Michael Caine.

And as reported by Variety, the Tenet cast has grown again with the addition of Himesh Patel. Unsurprisingly given the secrecy surrounding the film, there are no further details available about Patel’s character at this time.

An actor and writer, Patel got his first big break on the long-running British TV series EastEnders. In 2019, Patel scored his first major leading movie role when he starred as Jack in Danny Boyle’s high-concept musical Yesterday, about a man who wakes up to a world where the Beatles never existed and proceeds to pass off their songs as his own, a scheme that raises him to international stardom. Patel is also set to appear opposite Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones later this year in the action-adventure The Aeronauts. It’s truly been a meteoric rise for Patel after going from TV to his big movie break in Yesterday, to now being cast in a huge Nolan movie. It will be interesting to see what specific role Patel takes on in Nolan’s latest mind-bender, but no doubt the part will be heavier than the one he played in Boyle’s feel-good Beatles musical.

Indeed, it will be interesting to find out anything at all about Nolan’s movie, as details hopefully begin emerging in the coming months. If Tenet is anything like the director’s prior films, it will feature challenging storytelling that plays with time in interesting ways, and will tackle heavy metaphysical themes. Of course, there are some who aren’t huge fans of Nolan’s somewhat ponderous films, with their sometimes experimental narratives that play around with levels of reality and scrambled timelines in ways that can occasionally frustrate and confuse. No matter what though, Nolan’s films get people talking.