Mandeep Dhillon
Mandeep Dhillon is an actor, born 1990.
British television built Mandeep Dhillon in public, one series at a time. Born in England in 1990, she came up through stage work at the Bush Theatre and small television parts, then landed the lead role of Saz Kaur in the BBC Three comedy Some Girls, which ran from 2012 to 2014, and followed it with Amara in Fried in 2015 and Constable Lizbyet Corwi in The City and the City in 2018. Her films include the romantic comedy Finding Fatimah.
What she does well is play the person in the room who is quietly keeping score. Sandy in After Life is the clearest case: the newest person in a workplace full of grief-stricken and ridiculous adults, written as a straight man and played as someone actively deciding, scene by scene, how much of this she is prepared to put up with. It is a harder job than the writing makes it look, and the show leans on her more than it admits.
The recent decade has taken her to bigger, glossier machinery without much change in method. She played Allie Rajan on the American network revival CSI: Vegas from 2021 to 2024, which is a lot of procedural dialogue delivered at speed, then came back to British drama as Seraphina Harrigan in MobLand. Elsewhere she is Kamali Khan in the action series Bulletproof, Abby in the Channel 4 drama Adult Material, and Lieutenant Garan in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a part measured in seconds. The Sheep Detectives is next.
Movies (2)
TV (7)
Where to start with Mandeep Dhillon
Go to After Life first. Sandy gets the least showy material in a series about a man being awful to everyone, and Dhillon plays her without ever begging the audience to like her, which is why the character ends up being the one you actually trust.
Adult Material is the better piece of drama, though, and the one to watch if you want to see her range rather than her likeability. It is bleak, funny and completely unsentimental about the industry it covers.
For the mainstream version, CSI: Vegas is three years of solid American procedural work and MobLand is the current, meaner assignment. Bulletproof is the pure genre entry, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a single line in a very large film, worth mentioning only because people go looking for it.