Riz Ahmed: The Emmy-Nominated Actor On ‘Bait’, Bond Rumors & Opening For Wu-Tang Clan: “Nothing Carries The Cachet Of James Bond”

Riz Ahmed is used to taking chances. In 2012, he thought he was on the verge of a major breakthrough, having co-starred with James Gandolfini in the pilot for HBO’s The Night Of series, playing an ostensibly clean-cut college student accused of a brutal murder. The following year, the Sopranos star unexpectedly died at the age of 51 and the show was put on hiatus for the foreseeable future. “I didn’t have anything else going on at that point,” Ahmed recalls. Things are obviously different now. In 2016, John Turturro stepped in to take Gandolfini’s place in The Night Of, bringing Ahmed his first Emmy win for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Limited Series Or Movie. Then, in 2019, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal brought an Oscar nomination. But in the early years after he first became an actor in 2006, the former British rapper had been working on a much smaller scale, with starring roles in the likes of low-key indie drug drama Shifty and Chris Morris’s controversial jihadi comedy Four Lions. The future wasn’t looking great, and when an audition for Tony Gilroy’s dark media satire Nightcrawler came up, to play Jake Gyllenhaal’s sidekick Rick, Ahmed put everything he had into it. Literally. Watch on Deadline “There was no work for me in the UK,” he says. “I spent my last £1,000 to get on a plane and do the screen test for Nightcrawler. I cleaned out my bank account to fly to LA. I was absolutely on the brink.” It paid off, and a key role followed shortly after in Paul Greengrass’s action hit Jason Bourne (2016), which opened up the American market. Ahmed took a similar gamble when writing Bait, a six-part mini-series about a struggling actor in his native north London. Perhaps stubbornly, Ahmed refused to be cowed by the fact that he had no Plan B, and the future of the show would be decided by one woman, and one woman only. And if she said no, there would be no point in going forward. The crux of the show is that Ahmed’s character — Shah Latif, like him, a former rapper turned actor — is under consideration for the part of British super-spy James Bond. Time was a crucial factor, given that Bond producers Eon were in talks about handing over the reins to the 007 franchise to Amazon MGM Studios. “There were just so many obstacles,” Ahmed recalls. “I mean, when we had the idea, everyone was like, ‘Barbara Broccoli will never let you do this.’ We were about three and a half scripts in and we still hadn’t spoken to her, but it was just a leap of faith. I had a gut feeling. Everyone — my agents, Amazon — was telling me, ‘She never lets anyone do anything like this.’” The meeting, however, went swimmingly. “I met her, sat down with her, explained to her what it’s about — what’s really the heart of this show, and why I wanted to tell it — and to her credit she said yes. I’m really indebted to her. She did what she’d never let anyone do before. But that was one huge hurdle. Making a show like this that has so many different elements is very hard to pull off. It was like a layer cake of high-security safes that we had to hack to get through to even get it made. It’s a scrappy, smaller budget, half-hour show, hyper-specific, multilingual, genre-bending. It just felt like there was one thing after another that could have meant that this all came crashing down.” Bond, however, was the one truly immovable object. More people have walked on the moon than have played him, and — as we’re about to see with Denis Villeneuve’s Bond 26 gearing up for production — no other movie character provokes the same fervent speculation. “That’s absolutely right,” says Ahmed. “Absolutely right. Nothing carries that kind of cachet. Nothing is the epitome of cinematic achievement, alpha masculinity, and Britishness. And it’s that bullseye that my character is chasing as he seeks to try and be something better than what he is. Anything but what he already is and who he already is. It’s that mask he’s trying to hide behind as he runs away from himself.” It’s certainly a strange show, which made Ahmed all the more surprised to be nominated again for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie. “Honestly, I feel kind of shocked and extremely happy that we’ve been recognized in this way,” he says, “because it’s not your usual kind of TV fare. Particularly in this category, which is often big budget, hour-long stuff. We always knew this was very risky, something that didn’t quite fit into any of the usual boxes. It’s a drama with a very heartfelt family story at the heart of it, it has a kind of surreal psychological element, it’s a comedy, and it’s half hour. It was very deliberately genre-bending.” Ahmed is 43 now, two years younger than Roger Moore and five years older than Daniel Craig when they took the mantle of Bond. A call from Villeneuve seems unlikely, then, but the lure of Bond is hard to resist. Indeed, it was a mild case of Bond envy that gave him the idea for the show. “My neighbor had been mentioned in the Bond conversation,” he recalls, “as has everyone and their uncles, by the way. But him being mentioned really triggered a series of conflicting thoughts in me. Feelings of excitement, but also cynicism. What if? Wouldn’t that be cool? Or would that actually mean abandoning a more important project, one that had a deeper personal meaning? “It threw up really interesting questions around identity,” he continues. “And I feel like my whole life, I’ve had to contend with questions of identity — sometimes because I wanted to, sometimes because I haven’t. And so, I thought, Bond is such a perfect way to talk about stuff that’s super-personal and super-scary and super-vulnerable. Actually, yeah, I do want to be that guy. We all do. We all want to be Bond. And on the other hand, I don’t know if I’m good enough. Every actor has that, probably every human being.” But the reason Bait works is that there’s so much more to it than an actor in crisis. Away from the supposed glamor of the movie industry, Shah leads an otherwise perfectly normal dysfunctional British Asian family life in North London. “So much of this show is pulled directly from my life,” he says. “Across the board, this just felt like such a scary show to make on a personal level. This is definitely the most vulnerable, scary creative swing I’ve ever taken. To put my whole psyche, insecurities, anecdotes, family, community, insanity out there in a show in this way. It just felt very, very scary. It was the kind of thing where, once we’d finished it, I was like, ‘OK, great. We made it. Do we have to put it out now? I’m not sure I really want anyone to watch this.’” Riz Ahmed as Shah Latif in ‘Bait’. Amazon MGM Studios Indeed, when Ahmed says “the whole shebang” was pulled from his past, he means it. “We filmed in a house that was modeled exactly to be the house that I grew up in,” he says, “except the dimensions were slightly bigger so the camera could move around. Remember the staircase where my character gets jumped on at the start of Episode 3? I got jumped on that staircase in the park behind my mom’s house. That sweet shop that we buy sweets from? That’s where we went to buy sweets. That panic attack at the end of Episode 1? I had that panic attack on that stage supporting Wu-Tang Clan at the Kentish Town Forum and burst out of that same fire escape.” That said, not everything is autobiographical — the Wu-Tang meltdown wasn’t motivated by nerves. “They were two-and-a-half hours late on stage,” says Ahmed, “so when I went out to open up for them, the crowd were like, ‘Why is this not Method Man?’ I was signed to a techno label at that point doing experimental electronic rap, so not the right crowd for boom-bap, head-nodding rap purists. So, when I came on two-and-a-half hours late doing techno rap, 5,000 people started booing. I cut the music and I just started rapping an acapella of a track I’ve got called “Sour Times”. And they were booing through this whole two-minute acapella, and then a few people started cheering. A few more people joined in by the end of the acapella, then they all cheered, clapped, and gave me a round of applause. I thought, ‘I’ll take that,’ and I left. It was the shortest set I’ve ever done. Two minutes and 40 seconds. I was out of there, man.” Likewise, Ahmed didn’t take long getting back in the saddle: The last day of shooting Bait was his first day on Digger, the mysterious new film by the famously secretive Alejandro González Iñárritu (“I literally left one set and drove straight to the other”). Ahmed can’t say much about Digger, for obvious reasons. “I really want to preserve it for people,” he says, “but I can say that it was a really unique and bold experience.” Neither can he say much about Mark Wahlberg thriller The Big Fix, which he’s currently shooting in Malaysia with Baltasar Kormákur, although he does have thoughts about the local cuisine. “It’s so off-the-chain amazing. You’ve got Chinese food, Malaysian food, Indian food, and Thai food, all smashed together. My mouth’s watering as I’m talking. I’ve put on a lot of weight. It’s a problem here, bro.” Does this return to acting mean that Bait was simply a one-off? Could there be another series? “I’m not sure,” he muses. “I mean, it can work both ways. I really love that there was only one season of The Night Of. I really loved I May Destroy You, which was only one season. There’s also other shows that I’ve loved that have gone on for much longer. I’m not sure yet. I mean, I think there’s definitely a runway for these characters to grow, and I think these relationships are so fun to explore.” It must be a strange life being an actor, one minute recreating your childhood home in Wembley, the next acting alongside Tom Cruise at Pinewood Studios, then flying off to Penang. “Yeah,” he says. “I was hoping to try and capture that surrealness. But more and more — and I really do think Bait was a watershed for me in a way — what I’m trying to do is really ask myself: is what I’m doing really sharing something personal? Something that matters to me? I think that a lot because I don’t know. With, Bait this was so direct, but in many ways it’s a love letter to family. My character Shah wants to put on a mask. He wants to be this kind of archetype. He wants to escape who he really is. But the one place you can’t do that is with family. For better or worse, they’re the people who see through your bullshit and see you for the wonderful mess you really are.”