Riz Ahmed is sitting outside a restaurant in the heart of Manhattan on a sunny Saturday, just across from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and he is telling me how everyone I love is going to die. To be fair, he’s also telling me how everyone he loves is going to die, how everyone around us is going to die, how the two of us are most certainly going to die, and what a blessed relief that all of this death is anyway.
“Just... we’re all going to die, dude. We’re gonna die, bro. All of us. You’re gonna be dead. I’m gonna be dead. Everyone here. Everyone walking about here.” He marks a few passers-by out particularly: “They’re going to die.” He points to someone else: “They’re gonna die.” It’s Oprah Winfrey’s “You Get A Car”, essentially, but for death. He then adds, somewhat unnecessarily, “And at any minute.” I worry the last woman heard us.
Ahmed sits back in his chair, having finished an Asian chicken salad so big it looked set to capsize the table, but even in relaxed mode the 35-year-old boasts the kind of coiled intensity normally only seen in a man waiting for a serve from Federer. He speaks in bumper-to-bumper sentences and gridlocked paragraphs. His eyes somehow manage to widen while already widened. He may be the only man I’ve ever met with clenched eyebrows.
How we ended up here felt like a mystery at the time and only just about makes sense in retrospect. This tends to happen with Ahmed. Topics don’t so much rebound off each other as ricochet. It’s not that the directions they take are strange exactly, but at the same time you’d be doing well to predict them.
Talk of everyone’s eventual demise, for instance, came after a surprising segue into his own near-death experience – or at least what felt like one at the time – which itself came from the guilt of success (“If you’re handed enough good luck, you feel guilty about it”), the transience of art (“It’s not about what we leave behind”), the transience of DVDs (“There’s too much content out there”), being in a Star Wars film (“Fuck!”), moral philosopher Derek Parfit (“He talked about survival and what survives”), the illusion of control in life (none), the need to give something back in life (some), our fragility as human beings (“As men we don’t have the balls to talk about that”), the things that bring us closer to love (“And to the love that surrounds you”), the nature of ambition (misguided), the nature of internal limitations (also misguided), the nature of creativity (“Connecting with something bigger and other, like it’s flowing through you” – recommended), the state of independent cinema (“Dying”), what it means to have a sense of mission (“Something other than you” – also recommended), what it means to woke-tweet all the time (“It’s masturbation”) and what it means to take a starring role in a toothpaste commercial (that remains unclear).
And I swear the only question I asked was: “And you’re a planner in what way?”
By the end, I’ll understand nearly all of it, with the possible exception of the toothpaste commercial. But we’ll get to that.
Currently, the British actor means a lot of things to a lot of people. Most strikingly, last September, he was the first actor of South Asian descent to win an Emmy, when he picked up the Outstanding Lead Actor In A Limited Series Or Movie award for his starring role in HBO drama The Night Of, a granular, heart-wrenching look at every stage of the justice system through the eyes of a naive boy (Ahmed) accused of murder; one that showed what the lofty ideals of the justice system add (mostly via John Turturro’s principled state lawyer), but, more importantly, what the reality of it takes away (which is where Ahmed’s Emmy comes in).
A few months before, Time featured him on its cover, declaring him one of the most influential people in the world, partly due to his standout performances in a string of remarkably diverse roles (from The Night Of itself to a voyeur hack in Nightcrawler to a surfer dude in Girls to a tech titan in Jason Bourne to a Rebel pilot in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and partly due to the fact that, as an actor of Asian descent, he was playing such diverse parts in the first place – something at once remarkable (for the industry) and utterly depressing (that it’s considered remarkable).
After all, it was only after departing for the US and HBO’s The Night Of that Ahmed finally landed a lead role in what he once referred to in a Guardian essay as “the Promised Land”, which is to say playing someone whose skin is unrelated to the story.
“It’s not changing,” he says of young British actors of colour having to flee to the US. “I mean, it might be changing a bit, but it’s not changing fast enough. We have a serious problem in Britain right now. There has to be a willingness for gatekeepers to say, ‘OK, here’s a person from a background that doesn’t fit the traditional mould. They’re not experienced enough yet. Fuck it, we’ll upskill them.’ And sometimes that’s a headache. But there isn’t that willingness. People go, ‘Ah, well, there aren’t the people around.’ It’s not true! They’re just not on the traditional conveyer belts.”
Until The Night Of, there was a danger that Ahmed sat on his own conveyer belt – and it wasn’t exactly the Promised Land. They weren’t clichéd roles as such. The young Ahmed had made a promise to himself that he’d never do those – no taxi drivers or shopkeepers or bespectacled engineers with shirt-pocket pens here – but rather genuine zeitgeisty parts, ones that met expectations but often subverted them too. (Ahmed sees this as career stage two of a minority actor. Stage three is where he could play someone called Derek.)
Take your pick from unlawful detention (his 2006 debut The Road To Guantánamo), terrorism (The Path To 9/11 the same year), radicalisation (2007 TV movie Britz), terrorism again (2010 comedy Four Lions) and radicalisation again (2012’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist).
And so, he would do interviews for these films but refuse to talk about being a Muslim as well as an actor, lest he become known as a Muslim actor. He told the Observer in 2007 his religion was “a private matter”. Interviews with Ahmed often came with the strict proviso not to bring up race and religion. Anyone attempting to embed the two often got short shrift.
In 2013, the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone got it in the neck for asking how the events of 9/11 had shaped him. “Wow, how did we get to that?” exclaimed Ahmed, shocked. “How has it shaped my life more than anyone else’s?” Hattenstone replied that, well, he is a Muslim, his best-known work is about 9/11, he and his co-stars were detained under the prevention of terrorism act at Luton airport after attending The Road To Guantánamo’s premiere in Berlin, and he wrote a song called “9/11 Blues”, which contained the lyric “Post 9/11 I been getting paid, playing terrorists on telly, getting songs made”. Ahmed did not, however, concede the point.
And yet, now, he says, it’s different. He never set out to be a spokesperson for anything, never particularly wanted the millstone around his neck of having to speak for a race or religion, and never particularly liked the fact that while other actors were merely asked to explain their role as a roguish cad in a romcom, he was asked to explain extremism and the spread of global terrorism. But he’s felt, not least in the age of Trump, that he’s had to speak up, had to take on that mantel. Because if not him, who?
“Politics chooses you,” he says. “You’re born into a certain body at a certain time and certain place. It chooses you. You’ve actually got no choice [but] to be politicised.”
And so, he says, he’s aiming to “create a movement”. Really. Literally. In his flat. Every chance he can he gathers young talented people of colour and, piece by piece, Riz Ahmed sets about building the network they never had.
“That’s something I’m really trying to build, gatherings of film-makers of colour, South Asian artists, novelists... as often as I can. Bringing people together, organising, to give that sense that their experience isn’t a solitary one and that maybe their voice does matter. I want to join the dots.”
You have to say this for Ahmed: he doesn’t just talk a good game.
Having now comfortably reached stage three – in The Night Of he played a Pakistani-American from Queens where the hyphenate hardly mattered; in Rogue One he played Bodhi Rook from desert moon Jedha on the galaxy’s mid-rim – he could have simply stayed there and left everyone else behind.
I’m in stage three – laters.
In October, for instance, he’s co-starring with Tom Hardy in superhero film Venom. After that he’s in a Coen brothers-esque Western adaptation of The Sisters Brothers, alongside the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal and Joaquin Phoenix. Awards! GQ covers! Let’s go!
But does Ahmed want to just do that? Not quite. Because his current passion project, and the thing currently taking up most of his time, is his own nine-part BBC drama series called Englistan, which will chart three generations of a British-Pakistani family and, as the BBC blurb has it, “re-frame recent British history”. He will be starring and writing (“You get to a certain age where you think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this myself!’”), but, more importantly, he will be casting the other parts and hiring the other writers. Let’s just say the “Riz Ahmed Network” stands a chance.
“Hopefully, it will be a platform, an avenue to bring through new writing talent, new British-Asian writers, screenwriters, directors. To give them a platform. To tell these stories with new faces. To do what I can as an individual.”
It’s only later that I’ll realise this all links to my final question too.
Here’s another thing you should know about Riz Ahmed: he never met an incredibly depressing situation he didn’t like. Ask him anything – literally anything – about the clearly abject, awful, Trumpian, splintering, segregating, anti-science, proto-Nazi, post-fact shitshow-in-a-Handmaid’s-Tale-handcart reality we’re currently living through and he’ll tell you that it’s not all bad. In fact, that’s not quite right: he’ll tell you that, yes, it’s the worst thing he’s ever seen, truly dark times, but that this is a good thing. Case in point: despite Brexit, he believes the United Kingdom is absolutely headed in the right direction. But only because of Brexit.
“It’s like Indiana Jones,” he says. “We’re moving in the right direction, but the boulder’s rolling and accelerating behind us. And it’s because of that we’re accelerating. Positive change is accelerating. But only because the apocalypse is looming over us faster than ever, you know?” He likens it to the unrest of New York in the Seventies: “Two things can go in different directions. New York was on its knees. The punk scene was kicking off downtown, disco uptown, city’s going bankrupt. [It’s] when things are the hardest that visceral creative engagement can kick in.”
Or take Trump. “Yeah, what do you want to know, man? He’s a mate of mine. We’re old pals. He’s my homeboy,” he jokes, in a quote that a little bit of me wants Breitbart to take out of context and report seriously.
Ahmed used to be regularly stopped and detained at airports before he obtained his current visa. Once, famously, after The Road To Guantánamo, the filming of which saw his passport stamped with every stop on the “axis of evil”, he claims his arm was pulled up so far behind his back they nearly broke it, all because he was calling his lawyer (“They thought I was illiterate”). And several times after that, often with the young Asian security staff at Heathrow who searched him asking him to sign their DVDs, or finding, post-interrogation, his face on the cover of an in-flight magazine. And so, he is, as you might imagine, not a huge fan of the 45th president of the United States and his controversial Muslim travel ban, which he correctly predicts will be law by the time I write this article.
“And that’s terrifying. That’s scary. You know it takes on average 25 years to overturn a Supreme Court decision? And it’s very easy to add countries to that... I think to live in the US as a person of colour under a presidency that’s lurching quite deliberately towards proto-fascism is just terrifying. Things are bad.”
And yet, “That presents an opportunity actually. Where lines are drawn in the sand, where people decide what side of history they want to be on, what stand they want to take, you see this incredible mobilisation.”
When Ahmed talks about the thing he’s “less optimistic about”, a thing that is more systemic, the kind of change that isn’t about an administration but a generation, I am ashamed to admit that a little bit of my heart leaps.
I have you now, young Ahmed... Join me... on the depressed side.
“We’re living under a kind of surveillance capitalism,” he says. “We have bigger, more powerful corporations than we’ve ever seen. And they’re working hand in glove to commodify us, to commodify our private lives.” He’s talking, of course, about social media and search engines, how Facebook and Google and Amazon and everyone in between take details of your very life as part-payment. It is, he says, “a really difficult tide to turn”. It is, he says, “sweeping us all towards a dystopia”.
Now, at this point, you would think it’d be fairly difficult for Ahmed to find any kind of upside. After all, he’s said the D word. But you would be wrong. Because, he adds, “On the way to that dystopia, I think we might get some friendlier presidents. And TV might get really good. So we’re all right.”
Riz Ahmed might be the most optimistic pessimistic person I’ve ever met.
Ahmed grew up in Wembley, North West London, not particularly poor, not particularly rich. His father was a shipping broker, his mother looked after the children. Various members of his family lived in five houses on the same two streets and something similar was true for a lot of the families around him. Bonus: on Saturdays, when he went to Urdu classes, he walked back with half the neighbourhood. “There was a strong sense of community.”
It wasn’t long, though, until he got a scholarship to the private Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood and he started feeling like something of an outsider, a feeling that persists to this day. His main memory wasn’t of growing up in one place but switching between places: “I would go to school in Moore Park, but then bunk off to go hang out in Neasden. Or spend a day at your middle-class friend’s house and realise your neighbourhood isn’t as nice as theirs.” He mostly remembers he was very good at adapting to whatever environment he was in – “code-switching”, he calls it. “I wasn’t growing up as one self. It was kind of like acting from an early age.”
And yet, as much as he adapted to those environments, he had a knack of making environments adapt to him. In sixth form he exposed what he saw as rigged student elections and oversaw the appointment of the school’s first ever Asian head boy before he left. When he later went to Oxford to study PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), he found it stuffily white (the first girl he spoke to laughed at him and told him he sounded like Ali G), but soon set up his own drum’n’bass night.
“But, ultimately, if I’m honest, it wasn’t that selfless. I was fighting for people like me to be able to thrive there and not just survive there, you know what I mean? So it always starts from quite a personal place. Like, I wish I could carry on doing pirate radio sets in London. I can’t, so I’ll start a hip-hop drum‘n’bass night.”
His parents are naturally proud, he says, but it’s only recently they’ve accepted acting is not just a passing fancy. And I mean recently.
“I once told my dad, ‘I’ve done this film with Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s called Nightcrawler. Do you want to watch it with me?’”
His father replied, “You know, it’s not too late to be a banker.”
Ahmed was flabbergasted. “It’s a terrible time to be a banker, Dad! There’s, like, a financial crash!”
To which his father simply said, “At least you know where you stand.”
When, after Oxford, he was studying classical acting at The Royal Central School Of Speech And Drama, his aunties started phoning up his mother to “ask about introductory marriage proposals”. But his mother, fearful of putting them off, would simply tell people he was studying “classics”.
Have the aunties given up now?
“Is that what you’re trying to do?” he asks, mock-shocked. “You’re an auntie in disguise! [Laughs.] Well, no... no aunties are hassling me right now.”
He’d never really considered acting while growing up, he says, mainly because no one on TV looked like him and so he just never saw it as an option.
He remembers someone in his house would bellow “Asian!” whenever someone who looked like them appeared on TV and Ahmed would bolt down the stairs to generally find his mother in front of Goodness Gracious Me.
“It was game-changing,” he says of the show. “And it was a point of contact in otherwise frosty race relations at school. Like, ‘Did you watch last night’s episode?’ And we’d bond over it.”
One life goal that currently remains unfulfilled: starring in an episode. “I’m still waiting for a cameo!” he says. What, really? “I literally keep asking them.” But you’ve won an Emmy, I say. “I know. Ask them!”
So I did. Creator/star Sanjeev Bhaskar got back to me straight away: “We’ve kept all of Riz’s letters asking to be in Goodness Gracious Me and spent the monetary bribes he sent. If we’d realised just how good he was, I would’ve kicked someone out and made him a permanent member of the team. Of course, he’s now surpassed us all, so we’re having a whip round and getting our begging letters to him ready.”
I start to mention the belated controversy around Apu from The Simpsons and Ahmed interjects before I even get the question out.
“And how fucking racist it is?”
Yes. Did he think that growing up?
“No, actually. I think you set your expectations on what you’re presented with. It’s only when someone comes along and says, ‘Hey, hang on, we can set our expectations higher of how we’re portrayed’ that you start questioning it. To begin with, everyone just runs with it, right? If you’re not used to seeing yourself outside certain moulds, you kind of just accept that that’s your place in society, that’s your place within storytelling. And that’s so corrosive.”
He compares his own path as roughly equivalent to “the discovery of penicillin”, which is to say: unlikely. First, he had to get that scholarship to a private school, which is the only reason he even considered Oxford; then to Oxford, where he only started acting seriously when the one black person he knew there told him he should; then to drama school, for which he needed £2,000 and so couldn’t afford, until a kindly West End theatre producer who’d seen him in a play gave him the money for free; and, finally, landing a film role right out of drama school (The Road To Guantánamo), as it was a real-life story and he happened to be a spitting image for the lead. Which is why he now says, “I shudder to think about all the amazing talent that fell through the gaps.”
I ask if he still feels like an outsider wherever he goes. He says yes and allows it’s something broader too – about class as much as religion, about general imposter syndrome as much as any of the labels. But he also mentions that, recently, he went back to Pakistan, where his parents are from and, true to his nature, says he enjoyed it because of how out of place he felt. Or rather: because he didn’t go there expecting to fit in.
“I remember when I went when I was 15 and I was like, ‘I’m gonna feel like I’m at home. It’s gonna feet rooted, like this weird homecoming or coming back spiritually.’” It did not. “[Laughs.] No, it did not. It was like, ‘I do not fit in here at all.’ I mean, walking up and down Southall Broadway with a bunch of rude boys waving a flag on Eid?”
And so, this time, he simply embraced the fact that he was neither one nor the other, to “embrace my mongrel manifesto”.
“And they don’t know what to make of you,” he says, “and that can be such an asset. I hung out with transgender sex workers, professional wrestlers...” At one point, he says, he visited a Sufi shrine, but without the right paperwork and so soon found himself detained by the Pakistani military. Really?
“Yeah, they were like, ‘What do you do? What are you doing here?’”
So he told them – naturally – that he was a poet.
Ahmed explains: “People don’t realise in our culture how esteemed poets are there. The Middle Eastern version of American Idol is called Poetry Idol.” (It’s actually called Million’s Poet, but still.)
The soldier suspected a ruse – “He said, ‘You’re too young to be a poet. That’s a life journey’” – and so asked him to perform something for them.
“So I did. I did a freestyle rap and they let us go. Literally a freestyle, dropping bars. I’ve been getting really into my puns recently. They let us go and it’s not gone 12 o’clock...”
And that’s the story of how Riz Ahmed freestyled his way out of military arrest.
Ahmed, naturally, takes an upbeat lesson from this: “That’s what I want to do with my career: to incrementally make no-man’s-land more habitable.”
When he was considering the role in Four Lions, Chris Morris’ stone-cold work of satirical genius about four gloriously inept suicide bombers, he was apprehensive. “I just thought, ‘Is this, like, making fun of Muslims?’ A couple of people told me, ‘Don’t even look at it.’” It didn’t help that Ahmed had no idea who Morris – famed creator of The Day Today and Brass Eye – was.
“No, no idea. He was just this guy in cycling shorts. I didn’t realise he was a comedy legend until we started shooting. [Co-stars] Kayvan Novak and Arsher Ali were like, ‘Are you an idiot? He’s the Keyser Söze of British comedy!’” Regardless, Morris cajoled him. “He said, ‘Dude, that’s not the intention.’”
And so, they started meeting up, having regular long chats. Ahmed put Morris in touch with his friends up north and then their friends too. He taught him “about Islam, about the British Muslim experience, about the quirks and controversies and contradictions of it, the humanity of it, about some of the bizarre shit going on”. But he still worried about starring in it, until Morris put it like this: “This is a step towards a brown James Bond.” And suddenly, Ahmed says, he got it. “He was saying this is a step towards Asian people playing leading roles. That it’s not a step backwards.”
Would he like to be the first brown James Bond? I ask.
“You know,” he says, “any stretching the mould of what our traditional archetypes are appeals to me – so, yes, those classic stories, be it a kind of superhero or James Bond.”
There could be no more iconic role than Bond to do that, I say.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t want to speculate. But I think they’re great films. Bond keeps evolving.”
Here are the things we will talk about before we talk about death. We will talk about the thing that particularly surprised him during his research for The Night Of – that a new prison guard, in order to prove himself, would have a fistfight with any inmate who disrespected him. “They said, ‘You cuff them, you take them into a hallway with no cameras, you uncuff them, you go at it. You gotta be ready to do that a couple of times.’” (John Turturro will later tell me Ahmed struggled at first, that he wanted to do too much, “But once he learnt not to try so hard, he got it. He was incredible.”)
We talk about the dangers of social media, what he calls “confrontational soundbitism”, and we talk about the increasing creep towards the voyeurism of Nightcrawler but via social media. (Jake Gyllenhaal will later tell me over the phone that Ahmed is the only person who blew him away in the audition alone – “He’s the only person I handed over my respect card to straightaway.” They’ve since become good friends.)
We even talk about the problems with being woke. For instance: how much woke is too woke? What if he’s not woke enough? And how woke is woke in the first place?
“In the Eighties, with socialists,” he says, “you had this whole thing of holier-than-thou. Now it’s woker-than-thou. It’s a real occupational hazard trying to be a woke person in the public eye. Because if you’re not woke enough you’ll be held to standards that Mrs Bigot sitting next to you will never be. The safest thing you can do right now is keep your head down, keep your mouth shut and sell toothpaste.” And that’s when he mentions toothpaste again. He concludes, “You try to get involved and the people who behead you are your allies. We’ve reserved a special vehemence for people we agree with 90 per cent.”
We talk about the fact that, despite being an Oxford graduate, he’s not much of a reader. “One of the things I enjoy most about my job is the research. I get all my information from speaking to people. I’m not an avid reader, never been able to sit still long enough. I’m probably a bit ADD.”
And then I ask my question about planning for the future. Ahmed spoke about Englistan and Hamlet, his next two projects; about his love of spinning plates; how he likes to try to feed his “creative restlessness, but not my careerist restlessness”; and how he feels “like a shift happened for me a few years ago, when I started not being careerist in that sense”. And that’s when it becomes clear that Ahmed is actually talking about something else entirely.
What happened a few years ago?
“What I wanted to say,” he continues, “is that you can get to this point and go, ‘Well, actually, there’s not many people who look like me that sell toothpaste’” – the toothpaste ad again – “and you can think that’s a milestone. You know what I mean? It’s very easy to start thinking a win for me is a win for Team Empathy Stretch. Then you start doing things like tweeting the whole time. And it’s like, what are you doing? ‘Well, it’s important for me to have a presence on social media, see, because voices like mine are traditionally marginalised.’ And it’s like... you’re just masturbating. That’s the thing to clock. Where is this really coming from? Is this just about me?”
Sure, I get it, I say. But you suggested there was a moment when that changed for you. What happened?
He starts talking about being fearful of your livelihood, of achieving goals, of being in a Star Wars film and then he starts again: “I think, if I’m really honest...”
It was a few years ago now, “just as I was starting off doing Star Wars”. He’d shot, he says, “about five films over the course of a year”. He’d recorded a solo album. “Actually, two solo albums, one of which will never see the light of day.” He was writing. He’d made his first short film. “I was travelling a lot.” The Night Of, he says, “had been an incredible, emotional and physical drain”.
It came on him slowly at first, like the first sniffle of a cold, but it wasn’t long before he felt it in full. He had, he says, a complete physical breakdown. “I just got sick. I had to rest and lie down for a while, you know?”
He couldn’t do anything, he says, for more than two months. It’s not exactly that he felt he was dying, he says, nothing quite so dramatic. And yet, he says, “I remember being liberated by the morbid realisation of it.” And that’s when he tells me that me, him and everyone we know are going to die.
“I’ve had friends who’ve had really traumatic health scares. I’ve lost family members. [In] all these things, you experience your own fragility. It makes you take a different view.”
It made him realise how silly the idea was that “the work survives”, because what good was that? “It’s not about ‘my art will live forever’. It’s about what we pass on.”
And so, he says, it made him seriously work on Englistan and finally get it made, something he’d meant to do for the past seven years. He wrote a Guardian essay about his experience at passport control. He gave a diversity lecture to parliament. He started hosting dinners for up-and-coming artists who were being hosted by no one. He started speaking out.
“I’m not saying I live consistently this way,” he says, “but I feel I know what the goal is now. That feels clearer to me.”
What Ahmed feels now, most of all, and the thing we’ve lost, is the idea we don’t each have to change the world. We just have to tweak it and hope that’s enough.
“We’ve lost sight that everyone’s just making this incremental contribution. But it should be ‘I’m now going to pick up the baton and carry on.’ And that takes the pressure off. Like, you’re not gonna fix the fucking world.”
All you need to do, he says, is try.
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