17 hours ago
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Riz Ahmed was multitasking. It was February in London, and the actor was doing an interview with a men’s magazine en route to collect his kid from school. So far, so starry. “Here’s the reality,” says Ahmed today, palms slamming down hard on the table. “I’m late for the school run. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m meant to be at my laptop, but I’m having to do it on my phone, in my car. I’m double parked on a double yellow line, doing the interview, looking over my shoulder. The traffic warden’s coming, it’s rush hour. He tries to move me along. I try to get out of there while I’m talking on the phone to this guy.”
Distracted, Ahmed hit another car. The driver jumped out of his vehicle, incensed. “He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” says Ahmed, who had been attempting to continue the interview. “I’m now going off video, like, ‘Oh, my signal’s a bit bad!’ while going on and off mute negotiating car insurance details. On the phone, I’m going, ‘Absolutely, it was just such an honour getting to tell my story with these amazing collaborators,’” he says, his voice lowering an octave and turning smooth.
He muted the call and wound down the window. “Take my licence plate, bro!” he yells, accent reverting to born-and-raised–in-Wembley. “I’m not trying to fight you! Take my details, please!”
Ahmed attempted to explain that he was in the middle of an interview, but the driver was having none of it. “He goes, ‘You drive like that? I hope you don’t get the job.’”
Ahmed bursts out laughing. That day, he says, he felt the gap between the persona he needed to perform and the person he really is. It’s a familiar feeling for one of Britain’s most versatile actors. The film version of Hamlet he developed, which came out in February, elegantly reimagines the grieving prince as the son of a wealthy south Asian property mogul in modern-day London, and sees Ahmed appear as the titular lead in full Shakespearean verse. Later this year, he’ll star alongside Tom Cruise in Digger, the new Alejandro González Iñárritu film. A youthful 43, Ahmed’s particular mix of intensity, soulfulness and wit have even put him in the James Bond conversation, were the franchise willing to take a punt on a 007 who happened not to be white.
And that also happens to be the premise of Bait, the madcap TV comedy show Ahmed is about to release on Prime Video after developing it for the best part of 10 years. Ahmed plays Shah Latif, a struggling actor who bungles his Bond audition but somehow ends up in the running for the role. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and not just for Shah. His cousin Zulfi (a brilliant Guz Khan) sees it as a way to promote his new minicab business, Muber (“But Uber in London is already Muslim,” quips Shah), and his mum (played by Bollywood actor Sheeba Chaddha) might finally have something to brag about.
When we meet on a sunny Monday afternoon in east London, Ahmed is casual and comfy in black sweats, grey T-shirt and a burgundy jacket from Indian designer brand Kartik Research. Slung across the bench we’re sitting at is a beat-up 1950s aviator jacket from Front General Store, his favourite vintage shop in New York. In person, Ahmed laughs easily and listens closely, his gaze intense.
I’m interested in his choice to open his TV show with an audition. In an essay about being typecast as a terrorist that he wrote in 2016, Ahmed compared the airport interrogation rooms where he had frequently been stopped to audition rooms. “They are also places where you are reduced to your marketability or threat-level, where the length of your facial hair can be a deal-breaker, where you are seen, and hence see yourself, in reductive labels,” he wrote. In Bait, Shah feels limited by his various roles, destined to perform different versions of himself to the people in his life.
“Wow, this is like therapy,” says Ahmed playfully. “You’re joining dots I’d never even thought to! Send me the invoice after, yeah?”
Bait, he says more seriously, is about how life can feel like one big audition. “I hope that’s relatable to people outside of just actors,” he clarifies. “Even people who aren’t performers, we all have to perform in some sense or another, right?” Ahmed reels off his thesis. “We’re all projecting this version of ourselves that’s usually quite different to who we really are, or how we really feel, in order to prove to people that we’re enough.
“It’s maybe been exacerbated by the age we live in, and social media. We’re made to feel as though we have to reassert our importance, our relevance, our likability, our very existence. Social media has rewired our brains in such a way where we’re all having to do that.”
Ahmed has spent two decades proving his skill and range as an actor. His filmography spans satirical comedies and westerns, sci-fi and sensitive, culturally specific dramas. I ask him to describe the different eras of his career. His eyebrows narrow. “I really hoped I wouldn’t have to,” he says with mock seriousness. “Can you do it?” he teases.
Well, first, there were the breakout years, where he played with Muslim stereotypes post-9/11, with films such as his 2006 debut The Road to Guantánamo, Shifty, in the role of a drug dealer, and Chris Morris’s cult comedy Four Lions, about a quartet of lovable, incompetent jihadists.
His Hollywood era began with a supporting role in the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Nightcrawler and led to a high-profile gig as a tortured taxi driver and murder suspect in HBO’s 2016 TV crime drama The Night Of, which won him an Emmy. Around the same time he did Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Marvel’s Venom, as well as an underrated cameo as a surf instructor love interest in Lena Dunham’s Girls (look up the clip of him rapping Twista’s verse from Kanye West’s Slow Jamz). What’s obvious is that Ahmed has never wanted to be, or do, one thing. “I made a very deliberate choice to do Four Lions and Sound of Metal, to do Nightcrawler and The Night Of,” he says. “That’s due to my own restlessness.”
More recently, the actor has been interested in telling stories from his own distinctive point of view. In 2020, he co-wrote, produced and starred in Mogul Mowgli, about a British Pakistani rapper suffering a mysterious chronic illness, and in 2022 he and Aneil Karia won an Oscar for their sobering short film The Long Goodbye, which sees an ordinary south Asian family preparing for a wedding when their home is violently raided by police. The pair made the London-set Hamlet together, which Ahmed describes as a 15-year labour of love. “Hopefully you’ll get an era [now] where I get things made a bit quicker, now I’ve got my head around how you do it.”
In 2015, when the Hollywood Reporter announced the cast for Rogue One, Ahmed’s phone started blowing up. “People were texting me like, ‘Brooooo! Oh my God!’” he remembers. Yet the following day, he says, “I got banned from Tesco for suspected shoplifting.” His washing machine had broken, he explains. Fresh out of clean clothes and on his way to the launderette, he’d popped into the supermarket to buy his brother a birthday cake. “I was in fluorescent cycle shorts, a massive green padded jacket and, like, a string vest from carnival or something. You know those checkered tartan laundry bags? You know the exact ones I mean?” I know the ones, I tell him. “I’m just dragging it in.
“I bought him a pizza instead of a cake, because they didn’t have any good cakes there – don’t judge me. I didn’t check it out properly on the self-checkout, the alarm went off, I look like a crazy person, and I’ve got, like, a pizza buried underneath piles of dirty underwear and socks.” Ahmed delivers this story like it’s a well-practised part of a standup routine; I suspect he may have told it before.
Throughout our conversation, Ahmed is keen to impress that just like everybody else, he too is “chaotic, fucked up, vulnerable, hilarious and messy”. But the gulf between Ahmed’s impressive public self and the chaotic version behind the scenes has been widening for some time. “It became so big and so stressful that it became absurd, and quite funny. And so I started writing these things down.”
He noted down awkward moments such as being mistaken for the actor Dev Patel (“it happened again in a black cab last week”) and almost fist-bumping the late queen. “I’ve always been a fan of comedy from stress,” he says. “I’ve always been able to see the funny side of it whilst I’ve been in these incongruous situations. As I started writing about it from a more and more personal place, I realised how universal that feeling is.”
Ahmed is a naturally gifted comedian, with a lean, wiry physicality and impeccable comic timing. Yet his more recent, and more lauded, roles have skewed serious rather than funny. “Of course, the dream is to be a standup comedian, but everyone who knows me says, ‘Please don’t do that,’” he says, breaking into a pleading whisper. Comedy, he insists, is the purest kind of performance. “I see people like Hasan Minhaj or Ramy [Youssef], or Bill Hicks growing up, or Chris Rock, and the gloves are off, man. You live or die. There’s no fourth wall. There’s no politeness from the audience, it’s that moment to moment.” He snaps his fingers. “It’s about truth, honesty, connection, performance. I mean, there’s a reason why my first ever rap song was a comedy rap song.”
“Hi kids, welcome to fun-fun-fundamentalist / In the breaks, Nike’s advertising bomb-proof kicks / They’re even showing Bin Laden’s cave on Cribs!” he rapped gleefully, as Riz MC, on Post 9/11 Blues, released back in 2006. It caught the attention of Chris Morris, who went on to cast him in Four Lions.
At school, Ahmed says his behaviour was “quite ADD”, that he was bored, restless and disruptive. He was frequently sent out of class for making the other students laugh. The boys he grew up with were his brother’s age, so three years older than him. The runt of the group, Ahmed’s way of getting noticed was to play the joker. “I had big ears,” he says. “I could do a Prince Charles impression. I remember I would do this,” he says, pulling his ears forward, goofily.
“The things that were my hobbies became my jobs, right?” he says. “Music and this acting stuff, and writing and producing, it can kind of grow and grow and not leave a lot of time for other stuff.” Ahmed says he’s OK with that. At this stage in his life, “it’s mainly about spending time with my wife, my kid, my parents, my cousins”.
In 2020, Ahmed married the American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, whom he met in New York while preparing for Sound of Metal (the film for which he would receive an Oscar nomination). They have a toddler together, whose age and gender he doesn’t share. How is he balancing all of the acting, writing and producing with being a dad? “Great question,” he says, again gently deflecting with humour. “As my therapist, have you got any solutions for me about how we can work this out?”
Balance, he says, is the biggest question in his life right now. “I think balancing how much you choose to work in one place so we don’t all get uprooted and have to move around the globe … that’s one question. But I guess another question I’ve been thinking about a bit more recently is one of modelling versus presence.” He explains: “There’s something powerful in just being present with a kid. Not doing anything, just literally spending time breathing the same air, making eye contact, hanging out. And that’s something so nourishing, particularly for kids. That’s what I mean by presence.” At the same time he wants to model for his child what it means to do what you love in a way that aligns with the way you think about the world. An actor friend of his told him they chose not to work when their child was small, and to stay at home. “They’ve regretted some of those choices,” he says.
Ahmed, who is second-generation Pakistani, has been thinking about the way his own mum and dad parented him. “They had a lot less resources and choices than I did. I think of their labour and love and sacrifice as really heroic.” His dad was a shipping merchant while his mum took care of him, his brother and his sister. “My father worked on boats for a lot of his life, and so a lot of the time he had to be away.” He was absent for long stretches, sometimes months at a time. Did he miss him? “Yeah, massively, of course. Hugely,” he says. “I’m really cognisant of, on the one hand, learning from his example in knowing what it is to sometimes bite the bullet to provide for your family, versus not wanting to retread some of the pitfalls of that. In our adult lives, we’re all trying to climb back into that same treehouse we grew up in and fix it.”
How often does he see his parents these days? “All right, Auntie. Jesus Christ! You’ve got me on the hook here. Lemme get my calendar out,” he says, pretend-reaching for his phone. “I try to see them very regularly,” he says. Every week, every month? Ahmed looks at me quizzically. “Are you Asian?” he says, noting my own Punjabi-Sikh heritage. “You’d have a chappal flying at you through space and time if it was every month.” A chappal is a slipper, jokingly deployed by Asian parents of all backgrounds as a form of discipline. “Of course, at least every week. A few times a week.”
Recently, Ahmed has been trying to get better at cooking. His wife, he says, is a really good cook, the sort who can glance at a recipe then improvise. “I think I’m a good cook, but she doesn’t. The problem is, when I cook, I’m the only one who eats it.” What has he been making that she’s turned down? “I made fish curry the other day,” he says. “I thought it was nice. I rate it, I’m trying to back myself. She didn’t think that.”
Ahmed describes Mirza as “a truly creative person” whose writing “floors me every day”, though he says they try not to discuss work too much at home. “I probably try and hassle her for her opinion on things a lot more than she needs to hassle me for mine on writing. She doesn’t want my GCSE English ideas,” he says, self-deprecatingly.
But while he may wear it lightly, Ahmed’s intellect is no secret. A working-class British Pakistani kid from Wembley who won a scholarship to private school, he got into Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics, a typically star-making degree favoured by politicians, broadcasters and public intellectuals. He has never felt as if he was a natural fit for the establishment, but has always found a way to navigate it.
“There is a part of me, and I dare say a part of all of us, that is chasing external validation, and trophies and awards and accolades are obviously a tangible version of that,” he says. But the best part of winning an Oscar was seeing it in his family home. “It felt really good to be able to show up to my mum’s house and give it to her.”
Last month, Ahmed was a presenter at the Baftas, performing a skit on stage with the rapper Little Simz. He was in the room when Tourette campaigner John Davidson involuntarily shouted a racial slur while actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage. “It was a very confusing, awkward, tense, baffling moment for everyone,” he says. What did he make of the way Bafta and the BBC handled it? “Not well. Not well at all.” He adds that he was glad to see that Jordan had since won a Sag award for his film Sinners. “Less because of what these things can mean, but more as a message of respect and solidarity from the creative community,” because “no matter what position we get to in life, I think harsh words can land harshly.”
That night, the BBC broadcast also cut the words “Free Palestine” from outstanding debut director Akinola Davies Jr’s winning speech. Ahmed has long been outspoken on the issue, signing an open letter to Keir Starmer before he became prime minister, calling for a halt to arms sales to Israel, and performing at Wembley Stadium as part of the Together for Palestine fundraiser concert. Ahmed’s face is reflective when I ask if he has faced any repercussions in Hollywood for being candid about his political views. “That thought does cross your mind. I’m sure there’s some people that maybe didn’t like what I’ve said … But I also just think that in life you have to make choices. And I’m a father, and I want to try and model a way of being in the world that aligns to my values. I don’t think I’m saying anything aggressive or controversial in calling for respect for international law, or human rights, or protection of civilians, women and children, or the Geneva convention,” he says.
He is back on safer ground when talking about film-making. He describes being “blown away” by the Tunisian documentary-maker Kaouther Ben Hania, director of The Voice of Hind Rajab, and the most recent film by Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident. “What they’re about really matters. They were made against the odds, and they’re speaking truth to power in that way. But how they’re playing with form, how they’re innovating with how they’re subverting tone. First and foremost, it’s how they’re doing it,” he says, comparing their artistry to “doing wheelies”.
Ahmed himself is a restless, perpetual student. He is fluent in English, Urdu and French, practising the latter by “boring stuff” such as watching the news, listening to podcasts and trying to grab opportunities to speak to people in French. Over the course of our conversation, he references the Sufi poet Rumi, the Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (“the guy who wrote about flow states”), and the British theatre director Peter Brook’s 1968 book The Empty Space. “Peter Brook is saying the thing that makes Shakespeare such a G is actually that he’s not tonally consistent. You’ve got dick jokes next to the meaning of life. You’ve got prose next to poetry. There’s a sense of whiplash. The neurons are just firing. It’s like, what am I watching? That’s something that excites me.”
There are many reasons Ahmed has never liked being pinned down, either. “I’ve spent my whole life and my whole career, first probably subconsciously, and now quite consciously, trying to defy categorisation.” It’s why his new show is at once a comedy and a psychological thriller, a love story and a family drama, a coming-of-age story, and a tale of ambition. Tonally, it’s somewhere between film industry satire The Studio and the voice-y, personal storytelling of a drama like Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. “I’ve always had this maximalist sensibility, and I wanted to put it all in,” he says. “I want to kill categories. I want the things I do to smash through those genres.”
First, though, Ahmed needs to smash through today’s to-do list, starting with, once again, crossing London to collect his child from school, hopefully dodging any traffic wardens this time. “You don’t raise your kids, they raise you,” he says earnestly. Being a parent is “constant learning”. That’s exactly why he’s enjoying it so much. “Friction is where meaning comes from.”
