Riz Ahmed Has Won an Oscar and an Emmy. Now He's Showing Us Who He Really Is.

10 min readHe’s somewhere else.“I just saw a whale jump out of the ocean in front of me,” says Riz Ahmed, deadpan but also sort of awestruck, painting the view of the Tasman Sea from his Sydney apartment. The actor, forty-three, is wearing a purple beanie and an emerald-green cardigan, scanning the water through oversized glasses, eyes lost at sea. “I literally just saw that happen. That was crazy.”It’s about 8:30 a.m. in Australia, where Ahmed is away from his London home filming The Big Fix opposite Mark Wahlberg, a movie based on the story of a real FIFA agent who uncovered a match-fixing conspiracy in the early aughts. The Aussie leviathan is a welcome diversion, but not the first during our hour-and-a-half Zoom together. There’s a very serious coffee delivery (“Australians do not mess around with their coffee, man”), several conversations with his young son (“He’s excited that I’m not working,” Ahmed explains, muting himself each time) and his wife, the novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, asking for a charger (“Hi! So sorry to interrupt!”).We’re here to talk about the Alejandro Iñárritu film Digger, a political comedy in which Ahmed will star alongside a prosthetically potbellied Tom Cruise. It follows an oil tycoon (Cruise) who causes an environmental disaster (timely!), then must shovel his way out of it. Digger, out October 2, seems engineered to battle Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for just about every major award this fall. But when I meet Ahmed in June, he doesn’t want to spoil anything about the movie. Even when I try to do some digging myself.“Well, the origin story of [Digger] was that it just came completely randomly,” he says. “I mean, just to be candid, I don’t think I was who they had in mind for this particular role. I want to say more than that about the role because so little is . . .”He stops.CHANTAL ANDERSONJacket, vest, and tie clip by Versace; crown by Nick Fouquet; ring, available at For Future Reference Vintage.This article appeared in the September 2026 issue of Esquire subscribe“Well, I’m actually just realizing there’s so little that I could say about this project,” he says, his voice rising a couple octaves, as if he already told me something forbidden. “As I’m answering this question, I’m like, how do I back up even from there right now?”This is Riz Ahmed: guarded, thoughtful, empathetic, challenging, funny. All these things have made him one of the most compelling actors of his generation. And no, he’s not terribly interested in hyping the movie that he must hope could net him another Oscar nomination. But if you keep digging, maybe even to the very bottom, you might find something beautiful.CHANTAL ANDERSONJacket, vest, trousers, belt, and tie clip by Versace.Born in Wembley, in northwest London, to British Pakistani parents, Ahmed has a loaded résumé that, pound for pound, topples those of most of his peers. After graduating from the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2006, Ahmed immediately chased the sort of career-making-or-breaking roles that most actors don’t even consider until their forties.“Like, what did it cost you?” he tells me, explaining what he feels makes a worthwhile project in our slop-encrusted era. “Where’s your skin in the game, man? That’s what gives it meaning. Geez, if something feels easy, then it just feels like it didn’t mean as much.”His 2010 political satire, Four Lions—which sees him play a terrorist hell-bent on pulling off an attack in London, only to fail while wearing a bomb under an absurd, Grimace-like costume—is a cult classic. He crossed over into American projects in the mid-2010s, stacking critical hits like Nightcrawler (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Then came Mogul Mowgli (2020). Ahmed even starred as the prince in Hamlet (2025), a movie reimagining Shakespeare’s text as a fiery family drama set in modern London. He’s racked up plenty of awards recognition along the way, including an Oscar for The Long Goodbye—a short film attached to his album of the same name, because Ahmed has otherworldly MC powers too—and an Academy Award nomination for Sound of Metal (2019), in which he played a drummer who loses his hearing.This fall, he may add to his trophy collection for his Emmy-nominated turn in Bait, a series that he wrote and created for Prime Video. Bait hilariously plays out a delicious premise: a British Pakistani man auditions to be the next James Bond, only for it to instigate 007-level drama in his own life. “The way we all want to be seen is James Bond,” Ahmed tells me. “Jordan Peele said that being Black in America feels like you’re living in a horror movie; that’s why he made Get Out. My thinking was that being brown in the West can feel like you’re stuck in a spy thriller—that constant feeling of watching out and being watched.”CHANTAL ANDERSONShirt and slippers by Bode; trousers by Campillo; ring, available at For Future Reference Vintage.To the HBO Sunday-night crowd, he’s perhaps still best known for the 2016 miniseries The Night Of. He won an Emmy for his role as Nasir Khan, a Pakistani American who is wrongfully accused of murdering a woman—and spends time in Rikers because of it. It’s not hard to imagine Ahmed reprising the role and exploring what happens to wrongfully incarcerated men when they’re finally free. “There’s something to be said for: It worked,” Ahmed says. “Part of me feels like that about Bait. I’m still too close to Bait to work out whether it goes forward or not. But there could definitely be a story there.”It was a formative role for Ahmed, who was still warming up to Hollywood at the time. John Turturro and the late Michael K. Williams—who bought Ahmed a leather jacket on one of his few days off from set—helped him along. “He’s a proud Italian American,” Ahmed says of Turturro, laughing. “Sometimes we’d start talking about acting, and he’d say, ‘When you’re making meatballs, you just put the meat in the sauce, and you leave it. You know what I’m saying?’ And I was like, ‘I do know what you’re saying!’ ”Now Ahmed is starring in arguably his biggest project since his brush with the Star Wars universe. Digger marks Iñárritu’s first English-language feature since 2015’s The Revenant. The ultra-secretive movie seems like a cross between Dr. Strangelove and Don’t Look Up but infused with the manic energy of the director’s 2014 black comedy, Birdman. Ahmed plays Ganesh, who works alongside the president of the United States (John Goodman), and he says it was the first time he’d had to audition for a role in a decade. Iñárritu did a worldwide search to find Ganesh, Ahmed says, but he won’t share exactly what landed him the part. “My adolescent fixation is about trying to defy categorization or preconception, so I’ll say that about how I got the role,” he says.How do you model the idea that you can trust the world and it’s a safe place when sometimes it also isn’t?”Okay, what can Ahmed say on the record?He got the world-famous Cruise Coconut Cake, for one. “I don’t wanna jinx it,” he says. “I’ve had one cake—who knows if I’ll get another—I’m proud to announce. It’s a good cake. Spongey.”How was the Cruiser as a coworker?“For someone who’s so well-known and has been so iconic for such a long time, you would think that a lot of the aura around him is our projection onto him,” Ahmed says. “But it’s not the case with him. He emanates an energy and a focus that is really quite unique. There’s an undeniability to his fervor.”And the rest of the cast?“It was really inspiring and just a lot of fun for me to work with all these different actors in this great film: Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman . . .”—Ahmed trails off, his son’s back—“Is everything okay, Baba? Huh? You can’t right now, Baba, just because I’m in the middle of doing work. Give me one second.”CHANTAL ANDERSONJacket, vest, trousers, belt, and tie clip by Versace; brooches, available at For Future Reference Vintage; bracelet by David Yurman.There is a Tom Cruise story, actually. In one of the first rehearsals for Digger, Ahmed took a wild shot—an experiment, something different—and it flopped. Before he could move on and give it another try, Cruise stopped the entire rehearsal . . . to give him a round of applause?“That’s fucking amazing,” Ahmed says. “As someone leading this ensemble, to be like, Keep playing. Keep failing. I want to see more of that. Go run at it more. That attitude—he’s almost coach-like.”Ahmed is always reaching for something new, even alien, and it doesn’t make a difference if he’s rehearsing alone or if Maverick is there to rally him on. It’s when he’s at his best, and what he sees as the throughline of some of his greatest work, specifically The Long Goodbye short film, Mogul Mowgli, and Sound of Metal. All three premiered within six months of one another, from September 2019 to March 2020. It was when Ahmed evolved, at least in Hollywood, from the guy who stole scenes in Nightcrawler and delivered brilliance in The Night Of to an extraordinary actor who would stick around in our lives for a long time.“We made those things not thinking, Oscars here we come!” he remembers. “[Our thinking was] no one would see these projects. People connected with them really deeply because they came from a very personal place for me personally as well. Mogul Mowgli and Sound of Metal both came to me at a time soon after I had myself fallen badly sick and was hospitalized for a few months.”CHANTAL ANDERSONShirt by Campillo; trousers and loafers by Kartik Research; belt by Buck Mason.Ahmed hasn’t disclosed the exact nature of the illness, only that it struck him during the filming of Rogue One in the mid-2010s. It’s something he has only begun to talk about recently, but damn if it hasn’t upended how we see Sound of Metal and Mogul Mowgli in retrospect: Both are devastating portraits of creatives whose powers are stripped by something physically unexplainable. When Ahmed’s Sound of Metal drummer ripped out his new cochlear implants and his Mogul Mowgli character—also a rapper—buckled to the floor of a hospital bathroom, Ahmed was reliving personal tragedy. We just didn’t know it.“I feel like the universe and the creative process itself was telling me something,” Ahmed says. “Bait is a culmination of that journey, which is, the authenticity and the specificity of what almost feels too personal is actually what you need to share.”“Even in the midst of this positive and loud reception around work—that was wonderful—I felt quite anchored to something deeper,” he continues. “Even as that stuff was being received because I feel like it came from that place.”As Ahmed has made sense of the pain, it’s left more room for joy. You can see it in his work: look up the scenes in Bait where he’s talking to a disembodied pig head voiced by Patrick Stewart, or the way he biffs his way through a free-throw contest as the prince of a fictional country in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. But how can you keep everything you learned in a place where you can reach it?“We have these windows of wisdom, and then we forget again,” he says. “When I was in the hospital, I was like, Oh, my God. You don’t control anything. If you don’t control anything, that means everything you have is a gift.” And then, “You know, three months out of hospital, you’re like, what can I get?”You get better, go home, a pandemic happens, you win an Oscar, you have a kid, you make a few movies, you see a whale soar from the rim of the Australian coast. Life makes you forget.CHANTAL ANDERSONShirt by Bode; trousers by Campillo; bracelet by David Yurman; ring, available at For Future Reference Vintage.This past spring, Ahmed sat down for one of The Hollywood Reporter’s Actor Roundtables, where he busted it up with the likes of Harrison Ford, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Glen Powell. Ahmed said that after the birth of his son, he made a real effort to go out in public again, after years of shying away as his celebrity grew.“I don’t want to project a closed version of myself in the world in front of my child,” he tells me. “I’m still working it out, to be honest. That privacy for your child and openness as your example. How do you model the idea that you can trust the world and it’s a safe place when sometimes it also isn’t?”He thinks about this for a moment.“I guess part of it is about how I’m trying to approach the work and these interviews . . . Taking off the mask and not hiding.”Right here, right now, he’s here for his son, on a rare day off, while also trying to show up for a Zoom that takes up the better part of his morning. Has fatherhood changed him?“I hope it has,” he says. “A big thing that I’ve been thinking about is the power of being present. There’s a necessity to provide, and that means being away. There’s sometimes a male preoccupation with problem-solving, rather than being present with a feeling. I think fatherhood has taught me that. You know, my . . .”He pauses, weighing whether to take off the mask.“I very recently lost my own father. His work meant that he’d often have to be away. I saw him navigate that balance—fighting versus being present . . . Hey.”It’s his wife and son, together this time.“Do I have the keys for the car? Yeah, I do. Is he? Oh, lucky duck. All right. Have fun. Love you.”He’s back, present again.“I feel extremely privileged that I had him for so long, and that he was the man he was. My father was a man of great humility, dignity, warmth, humor. He was a content guy. It shifted my idea of what success is and what it looks like.”So what is success for Riz Ahmed? When he was holding his son on his lap, mute button on, telling him something only he can hear.As seen in the opening image: Jacket by Prada; bracelet by David Yurman; brooch, available at For Future Reference Vintage.Story by Brady LangmannPhotographed by Chantal Anderson Styled by Alfonso Fernandez Navas Grooming by Michael Dueñas Tailoring by Neli Abrahamyan Production by Hyperion Esquire Executive Design Director: Martin Hoops Esquire Visual Director: James Morris Esquire Senior Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler Esquire Editor-in-chief: Michael Sebastian