Sanjeev Bhaskar
Sanjeev Bhaskar is an actor, born 1963.
Sketch comedy built Bhaskar's name. Goodness Gracious Me ran on BBC Radio 4 and then on BBC Two, and he went on to star in the sitcom The Kumars at No. 42. Neither is in this catalog, which is a genuine gap. He also presented India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, a travel documentary series that took him to his family's ancestral home in what is now Pakistan, and he has been chancellor of the University of Sussex since 2009.
The second career is drama, and it took. He played Dr Prem Sharma in The Indian Doctor and Sunny Khan in Unforgotten, and the second of those is the important one: a cold-case procedural built on patience rather than incident, which he plays completely straight. He is a comedian who declines to use comic timing when he acts, and that is rarer than it sounds.
The film record is a long string of small parts done well, and it doubles as a decent map of thirty years of British cinema: the loud man in the restaurant in Notting Hill, Rasphal the cook in The Guru, Dr Jafri in both Paddington 2 and Paddington in Peru, Jed Malik in Yesterday, Cain in The Sandman, David Singh in The Flash, the lead elf in Arthur Christmas, Mad Doc in Dragon Rider.
Movies (18)
- The Family Plan 2 (2025)
- The Flash (2023)
- Notting Hill (1999)
- Paddington in Peru (2024)
- Paddington 2 (2017)
- Yesterday (2019)
- Absolutely Anything (2015)
- Scoop (2006)
- Arthur Christmas (2011)
- Dragon Rider (2020)
- The Zero Theorem (2013)
- The Guru (2002)
- Horrible Histories: The Movie — Rotten Romans (2019)
- London Boulevard (2010)
- Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! (2021)
- Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)
- Doctor Who: Dark Water / Death in Heaven (2014)
- And the Winner Isn't (2017)
TV (11)
Where to start with Sanjeev Bhaskar
The comedy made the name, but the drama is the better starting point. Unforgotten is where to go: a cold-case series that moves slowly on purpose, and Bhaskar underplays it so thoroughly that you can forget he built a career on being funny.
The Indian Doctor is the gentler companion and the other genuine lead, a period piece with a much lighter touch. Then the small pleasures: Paddington 2 and Paddington in Peru give him the same doctor twice in the warmest films on the list, Yesterday and The Sandman are the pick of the recent supporting parts, and Notting Hill is a bit part from 1999 and the earliest film credit here.