[2] In 1982, five years after leaving Guildhall, Malik was cast as Hari Kumar in the Granada Television production of The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet.
[2] In 1987, he played Kamran Shah, an Afghan Mujahideen leader who allies with James Bond and leads a raid against Soviet invaders in the 007 film The Living Daylights.
Malik played the role of the son of an Indian mobster in the 1992 film City of Joy and, in 1993, narrated Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories on BBC television's Jackanory.
[4] In 1994, Malik played his first big screen villain, Salim Abu Aziz, a stereotypical Islamist, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies.
[2] Malik took the lead role in the West End production of Tom Stoppard's 1995 play Indian Ink.
He also ran up high bills on his credit card, and by 1993 he owed £55,000 to the bank and £32,000 to the Inland Revenue, and was on the verge of being declared bankrupt when he got the lucrative part of Salim Abu Aziz, a terrorist, in James Cameron's True Lies.
[13] Malik took a major role in fundraising for relief work for victims of the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, and also appeared on the DEC Pakistan Floods Appeal advertisement in 2010.