Across television and film alike, Riz Ahmed has built a reputation as one of his generation’s most accomplished and soft-spoken performers. Ahmed’s Emmy-winning work as Naz Khan on HBO’s The Night Of found the Pakistani-American college student stunned into near-silence after being accused of a grisly murder he didn’t commit. His Oscar-nominated performance in Sound of Metal forced drummer Ruben Stone to slow down and come to terms with his new life as a deaf man, which he spoke to our own Joey Magidson about here (and subsequently here). Even his more recent work in the David Mackenzie thriller Relay tapped into a similar sense of composure and calm.
Of course, Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate whose onscreen accomplishments are nearly rivaled by his offscreen work as both a rapper and an activist. For all those beautifully contemplative and quiet projects, the real-life Ahmed is a much more outspoken individual, preoccupied with many of the same neuroses that plague us all. It was therefore only a matter of time until Ahmed shared his “true self” with audiences, laying bare all his ambitions and insecurities in his Amazon Prime limited series Bait, which follows a Pakistani-British actor and his family as rumors swirl that he has been cast as the next James Bond.
“I like to think I’m not as lost and as spiraling as [Shah Latif], but I definitely have that in me,” says Ahmed. “I think we all have that in us. He is projecting this public version of himself, like we all do, because we feel like we’re not good enough. And in doing so, he is looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Ahmed leaned into his personal experiences in sketching out Shah’s journey, which includes pit-stops at the King’s Museum Gala and an Eid celebration gone wrong, not to mention regular check-ins with a talking pig’s head voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart. Shah’s downward spiral may be rather exaggerated relative to Ahmed’s steady ascension through the Hollywood ranks, but it still evokes the legitimate anxieties of a proud Muslim actor whose identity and faith have remained at the forefront of his work.
Beyond all the surrealist touches that make Bait such a hilarious and surprising watch, the cultural elements of the show stand out as particularly authentic. A key component of that authenticity rests in the show’s dual use of language, allowing its characters to freely alternate between English and Urdu, just as any Pakistani family might.
“Changing languages and code-switching in other ways is a big part of the show,” says Ahmed. “But to be honest with you, we just wrote the script, and when we turned up and started shooting it, we didn’t even discuss what would be in Urdu and what would be in English. It just happened. We just all started chatting like we would as a family, dipping in and out of these different languages, and it just felt real.”
Ahmed attributes much of that naturalism to his cast, who form not only an all-star crew of Pakistani and British performers, but a genuine familial unit. The star turned to a pair of familiar faces to anchor Bait‘s central family: Sheeba Chaddha, who played Ahmed’s mother in Aneil Karia’s Hamlet earlier this year, and Guz Khan, with whom Ahmed goes back even further than he once realized.
“When we were on set he said ‘bro, you don’t remember the first time we met, do you?’ and I was like ‘of course I do, about six years ago’ and he was like ‘nah, we met twenty years ago.”
As the story goes, Ahmed was in Khan’s hometown of Coventry for a spoken word performance he had booked with the local student union. Young and naive, Ahmed interrupted a back-alley “business transaction” to invite Khan and his friends to the event…and they actually showed up!
“He said it was the first time he saw someone look like me, performing in that way in a space like that,” says Ahmed.
And so a long-term bromance was birthed, culminating in their work as a pair of cousins and complicated friends in Bait.
Check out our full conversation with Riz Ahmed below, where he shares a few other incredible anecdotes about how the show’s cast came together, and dives into the essential role that music plays across all six episodes.
Related
