Ali Fazal and his Christie caper

Calling his journey in Hollywood ‘democratic’, the actor shares ice-breakers and 4 am moments from Kenneth Branagh’s flashy mystery, Death on the Nile

On the first day of filming for Death on the Nile, Ali Fazal found himself on a small boat with most of the principal cast that included Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and actor-director Kenneth Branagh. Though the cast had gone through table reads together, the ensemble didn’t really know each other very well. “Ken and Annette were sitting right in front and he took out these little notes that had clues about everyone on the boat. Like ‘this person appeared in Friends and became blah blah blah’. Everyone guessed Jennifer Saunders because she played Emily’s (Ross’s British girlfriend) mother. It was a sweet way of breaking the ice,” the 35 year-old actor remembers.

This adaption of the famous Agatha Christie novel, Death on the Nile (‘that released on November 1, 1937’), has Branagh reprising his role as the famed literary detective Hercule Poirot, complete with an extremely bushy moustache. Fazal plays the slippery Cousin Andrew, who is one of the suspects. “In the book, this character was Uncle Andrew so the character’s age had to be reduced.”