Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the HBO Max limited series, Station Eleven.
There are too many Emmy snubs to list for HBO Max’s generous post-apocalyptic limited series Station Eleven (justice for Matilda Lawler, Mackenzie Davis, and Danielle Deadwyler! Justice for the show itself!). But the Emmys did get one thing very right: nominating Himesh Patel as Lead Actor in a Limited Series. His understated, vulnerable, and nuanced portrayal of Jeevan Chaudhary was the show’s beating heart. He created an indelible portrait of a man with the makings, but not the tools, of a hero, whose instincts drive him to do the right thing even when (or especially when) it’s the thing he least wants to do. He nailed the most heartbreaking and most heart-expanding moments, while also being one of the funniest people on a show with a surprising number of laughs. Patel brought Jeevan’s journey from aimless Chicagoan to post-apocalyptic healer to vivid, comic, and humane life, and his performance deserves every recognition.
Jeevan is one of the first people we meet in Station Eleven’s premiere. As he watches Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) perform as King Lear, Jeevan is the first person to notice Leander is having a heart attack. His instinct is to climb over chairs and affronted patrons to reach the stage — only to watch helplessly, without medical training, as Leander dies. Those same protective instincts lead him to walk Leander’s young costar, Kirsten (played as a child by Lawler and as an adult by Davis) home, and then to become her de facto caretaker in the early days of the end of the world. Eventually, wolves and snow and a mysterious birthing center separate them. By the time they are improbably reunited 20 years later, Jeevan has come into his own as a proper healer, one whose warmth and compassion can bring life into the world, protect it, and then gently bear witness to its end. Patel inhabits every movement of Jeevan’s journey with indelible care, specificity, and a deeply lived-in quality.
That lived-in quality helped to anchor a show that in lesser hands could easily have spun off into pretension, what with its mysterious spaceman, Shakespeare-loving post-apocalyptic theater troupe, and timelines that looped and braided back into one another. In every line, every gesture, every facial expression, Patel created a character we could immediately root for and invest in. His millennial ennui and professional aimlessness felt immediately identifiable, a recognizable friend we could empathize with in an unimaginable situation. Patel invested the same specificity in low-stakes, everyday cares — repeated text typos, a broken remote control, a love of YooHoo — and the unfathomable upheaval of facing a crumbling society while caring for a child he barely knows, creating a living, breathing portrait of a person just like you or me in a situation we can only begin to comprehend. It helps, too, that he entirely nails Jeevan’s very specific Chicago accent — Patel deserves an Emmy for his dialect work alone, offering one of the biggest “WAIT, he’s BRITISH?” revelations this writer’s house has seen in some time.
All the detail and care that Patel poured into his performance resulted in a deeply humane portrait of a guy who is not heroic, who doesn’t want to be heroic, but who cannot stop himself from doing the right thing. With just a few missteps in performance, Jeevan might become a saint or a martyr, but in Patel’s eminently capable hands, he is simply an exceptionally good-hearted and deeply flawed human being. He walks Kirsten home (first to her own, and then to what will become her two post-pandemic homes) because it’s the right thing to do, but Patel never shies away from showing us the ways in which this inconveniences and frustrates Jeevan. His care for her is never in doubt, but neither is the toll it takes on Jeevan to suddenly have someone so dependent on him when dependability has never been his strongest suit. With great subtlety and generosity, Patel lays bare all of Jeevan’s shades: his innate goodness, his petulance, his aimlessness, his discovered solidity, and underneath it all his deep and unquenchable empathy.
But for all the ways in which Patel crafts a nuanced and moving portrait of a person coming into their own under the worst possible circumstances, he also imbues Jeevan with terrific comedy. Most of our time with Jeevan is spent in the worst days of the pandemic, the days of most death and destruction and inhumanity. Patel makes these difficult passages survivable — for us, and also sometimes for Jeevan and Kirsten — with precision comic timing. Whether it’s a floundering attempt to describe his work (or lack thereof), an admonishment to his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan — Emmy justice for him too!) that “we have a kid now,” or a jaunty dance in a rainbow clown wig, Patel provided levity and laughs at many of the moments where they were most needed. “So pretentious!” a wolf-mauled Jeevan hilariously wails at the titular comic book; thanks in part to Patel’s sharp and surprising comic performance, the show never is.
This combination of humor and humanity, so finely wrought in Patel’s performance, allows for Jeevan to have some of the show’s most heartbreaking and most transcendent moments. From the elated wonder in every corner of his face during the Winter Solstice’s birth scene to his desperate clutching of both young Kirsten and the ghost of his brother to his gentle care as the Conductor (Lori Petty) takes her final breaths, Patel makes Jeevan’s joy, pain, and kindness our own. It is especially notable that two of the most moving moments — the mostly silent reunion hug with adult Kirsten and their morning-after goodbye talk — are performed with an actor he had not built an on-screen relationship with. Patel seamlessly transfers the strength of the relationship he built with Lawler to the new-created one with Davis, allowing him to help deliver the emotional high point of the entire series with almost unbearably moving results.
In their final conversation, Jeevan delivers a devastatingly astute description of parenting: Kirsten was never scared with him, but Jeevan “was scared all the time.” In Patel’s performance, he gives us access to both the terror and the love of parenting, to the joy and frustrations of caring for another person. By so clearly delivering Jeevan’s journey, Patel was the heart powering the show: the last face Arthur and the Conductor saw, the parent Kirsten needed, the healer he was always meant to be. From “Leavin’ Jeevan” to the father who will always return to his family, Jeevan’s journey was the show’s clearest example of how we can always change, always become better versions of ourselves — and Himesh Patel makes every step of that journey brightly alive, more than earning this nomination.