Nemo has appeared in various film adaptations of Verne's novels, where he has been portrayed by actors as James Mason, Herbert Lom, Patrick Stewart, Naseeruddin Shah, Ben Cross, Omar Sharif and Michael Caine.

"[1] Chief among the few details of Nemo's history given in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas are his hatred of imperialism and his grief over the loss of his loved ones in years past.

[2] In The Mysterious Island, Captain Nemo identifies himself as Prince Dakkar, son of the Hindu raja of Bundelkhand, and a descendant of the Muslim Sultan Fateh Ali Khan Tipu of the Kingdom of Mysore, famous for the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–1799) and Mysorean rocket technology.

[2] Nemo claims to have no interest in terrestrial affairs but occasionally intervenes to aid people in distress, e.g., by giving salvaged treasure to participants in the Cretan Revolt (1866–1869) against the island's Turkish rulers; by saving (both physically and financially) a Ceylonese or Tamil pearl diver from a shark attack; by rescuing the castaways in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas; and by covertly protecting another set of castaways in The Mysterious Island.

Like many actual Indian princes of the era, Nemo received a Western education, during which, as he states, he spent his youth touring and studying throughout Europe.

Nemo dies of unspecified natural causes on board the Nautilus, docked permanently inside Dakkar Grotto on Lincoln Island in the South Pacific.

He goes on to describe Nemo as a tall, self-contained man with a straight nose, broad brow, and wide-set eyes—"certainly the most wonderful physical specimen I'd ever met up with."

[4]Nemo is devoted to his crew and grieves deeply when members are killed after a mysterious collision with a surface vessel or during a giant squid attack in the Caribbean Sea.

Moreover, he is a man of immense courage, taking the lead in every emergency, from fighting sharks and squids to releasing the Nautilus from Antarctic ice—an ordeal that entailed reduced oxygen stores and consecutive eight-hour shifts.

Utilizing them with extraordinary skill, he navigated some of the ocean's most difficult underwater passages, such as those beneath the Antarctic ice barrier, as well as a fictitious tunnel under the Isthmus of Suez.

He demonstrates his linguistic ability in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, when Arronax and two other character speak to him in French, English, German, and Latin and he understands all four languages.

Subsequently, a rather different container does wash ashore in The Mysterious Island, bearing tools, firearms, navigational instruments, an atlas, books, blank paper, and even clothing.

Throughout the same book, Nemo repeatedly acts in this providential way, as when the sailor Pencroff pines for tobacco, then the young naturalist Harbert identifies some of the island's plant life.

Described as an elderly man in his late sixties, Captain Nemo claims in its pages to have conducted his undersea travels some sixteen years earlier than the dates given in the prior novel.

They may have arisen from Hetzel's insistence that Verne drastically revise his original concept for the latter novel, in which, some scholars speculate, he had not initially planned to include Captain Nemo at all.

Actors who have played him include: In the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, Captain Nemo's Indian ancestry as Prince Dakkar is emphasized, yet his religious identity is left ambiguous between Hinduism and Sikhism.

Journalist Shreya Ila Anasuya writes that Moore's Nemo is "nebulously portrayed as a Kali-worshipping man in a turban, never self-consciously Sikh.

In the 2006 graphic novel Captain Nemo by Jason DeAngelis (Seven Seas, ISBN 978-1933164083), set in an alternate timeline where Napoleon was never defeated at Waterloo but went on to found a dynasty whose descendants have conquered most of the world, Captain Nemo was, according to the French authorities, "slain and his accursed Nautilus sunk" in 1873, and twenty years later his son (who bears the same name as his father) leads his crew aboard the Nautilus II against the forces of Napoleon IV using the same tactics as his father, who is buried in a coral tomb, along with members of his crew, on the sunken island of Lemuria.

In the novel ... no one of Alberto Cavanna (original title ... nessuno, Mursia, Italy, 2020), Nemo is John Digby, an admiral of the Royal Navy, appointed captain of the Nautilus by the dying builder.

Loosely based on the original Jules Verne novel, this series portrays Nemo's anti-imperialist struggle against the British East India Company.