Khan played a police inspector in the 2008 film "Slumdog Millionaire", for which he and the cast of the movie won Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. About him, Danny Boyle said, "he has an instinctive way of finding the 'moral centre' of any character, so that in "Slumdog", we believe the policeman might actually conclude that Jamal is innocent." Boyle compared him to an athlete who can execute the same move perfectly over and over. "It's beautiful to watch."