Ellie Bamber and Mehdi Dehbi sat down with HeyUGuys to discuss Prisoners of Paradise, a sweeping period romance shot on location in Mauritius and set against the island’s fraught colonial past.
Set in 1924, Prisoners of Paradise carries audiences to Mauritius, threading a sweeping love story through the island’s tangled history of colonialism, race and resistance. For both actors, taking on the project meant stepping into a chapter of Mauritian history they knew little about beforehand. Bamber, who was on the island during the Covid pandemic ahead of filming, says the enforced isolation became an unexpected gift; time to immerse herself in the island’s past while soaking up its culture, food, music and people. “It was amazing to have that time to kind of delve in and then also explore Mauritius,” she recalls.
The pair talk about filming through lockdown, uncovering the real history behind Lucy and Krishna’s forbidden relationship, and bringing the film’s political undercurrents to the screen. Dehbi explains why he sees the story as fundamentally Shakespearean and reveals that Tamil was the hardest language he’s ever had to learn for a role, while Bamber reflects on discovering Mauritius through Lucy’s eyes. They also look back on meeting before the shoot, building their chemistry on screen, filming the emotionally charged climax tied to Le Morne, and working closely with the production to do justice to the deeply personal story of the late Alan Govinden. They close by sharing what’s next for them both. *Prisoners of Paradise* is available now on digital platforms.
Dehbi sees a Shakespearean thread running through the central relationship: as in Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are caught in forces much larger than themselves.
That historical weight mattered all the more because the film held real personal significance for its producers, among them the late Alan Govinden. Bamber and Dehbi spent considerable time with Govinden, his family and the wider production team, coming to understand their ties to Mauritius and the story they set out to tell. Bamber says the set carried a particular energy, knowing the film was so closely bound up with the producers’ own history. Language added another layer of challenge: Dehbi calls Tamil one of the toughest languages he’s ever tackled for a role, while Bamber found her own way in through her character Lucy, an outsider herself encountering Mauritius and its cultures for the first time.
The pandemic shaped their process from the start. Bamber and Dehbi first met in London in March 2020, then reunited months later in Mauritius, where quarantine and lockdown rules dictated much of the shoot. Their final scenes; the emotional heart of the film; were saved for late in production, giving them time to let the relationship deepen before facing its climax. That climax is tied to Le Morne, the UNESCO World Heritage site that stands as one of Mauritius’s most powerful symbols of resistance, lending the story further gravity. Above all, Bamber and Dehbi hoped to honour that history and the people who lived it; Govinden most of all, whose death not long after filming wrapped gave the project an added, painful poignancy.
