First Muslim up for best actor
Riz Ahmed’s latest film is nominated for six Oscars.
It is not initially clear if Western democracy is going to survive this conversation with Riz Ahmed, though that isn’t the 38-year-old British actor’s fault.
He is talking on a video call from the United States at the same time as an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters is storming the US Capitol building. It’s just after lunchtime and before we speak, he’d been watching events unfold live on the news; mouth open, sandwich untouched.
Fortunately, Ahmed is 4200km away from the trouble, in rural California, where he has just finished shooting Invasion: a science-fiction thriller from Michael Pearce, the Bafta-winning director of Beast. But the film on his mind is Four Lions, the jet-black 2010 Chris Morris satire in which he played the ringleader of a small band of hapless Sheffield jihadists who eat their mobile phone Sim cards to avoid government surveillance and believe Jews invented spark plugs in order to manipulate traffic. Eleven years on, such lunacy has gone mainstream, while everyday politics — on the far side of the Atlantic, at least — teeters between absurdist sitcom and suicide cult.
“We live in such crazy times that comedy is struggling to keep pace,” he says. “I think it would be hard to do that kind of satire now. You can’t satirise a reality that already feels made up.”
Meanwhile, in other news that can’t be true but somehow is: a shaft of sunlight. Ahmed’s outstanding new film, Sound of Metal, is the kind of spellbinding character piece that is too often jostled out of the Oscars race by heftier competitors. Yet in the 2021 edition, there it is — nominated in six categories at this month’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, for which Ahmed is the first Muslim nominee in the ceremony’s 93-year history. Sound of Metal has also picked up four nominations for Saturday’s Baftas.
Ahmed has arrived at this milestone 15 years into a quicksilver career that has snaked from such gutsy independent British productions as Four Lions or his 2008 breakthrough film Shifty, to connoisseurish critical favourites Nightcrawler and The Sisters Brothers, via the thundering mega-cogs of the Star Wars, Bourne and Marvel franchises. But securing leading-man status took a gruelling uphill push.
Sound of Metal’s director, Darius Marder, cast Ahmed as the film’s protagonist — a rock drummer called Ruben, whose sudden hearing loss brings on an existential crisis — after the pair met for lunch in 2017. Yet funding this modestly budgeted film with a British-Pakistani actor proved close to impossible — even one who’d just won an Emmy for his work in the HBO series The Night Of, and helped bring down the Death Star in Rogue One. In fact, the money was secured only after Marder put out an SOS appeal to some friends outside the industry 12 days before filming was due to commence.
“I’m not going to say the financiers failed to come through because Riz is brown, because that wouldn’t be fair,” Marder tells me later by telephone. “But they certainly didn’t succeed. Hollywood talks a good game about diversity, but when the time comes to act on it, it’s a very different story.”
“I feel like, for a lot of people, after a Shifty ora Four Lions, they’d be in Hollywood,” Ahmed says. “After one of those, the business would be like, ‘Wicked — put him as the lead in a period drama.’ That’s not available to someone like me. Instead, it’s a process of chipping away — a much longer, more arduous journey. But it’s one I’m grateful for, because it allows you to build more solid foundations. You’re not just rocketing up, tapdancing on clouds. You’re building your way up.”
Part of the appeal of Sound of Metal was the sheer amount of selfassembly required. Ahmed learned how to drum, and also became fluent in American Sign Language over seven months — a process, he says, which taught him that “deaf people are the best listeners in the world.
“The community showed me the true meaning of listening,” he says. “It’s not just something you do with your ears. It’s about being present with your whole body, and giving the other person their space to communicate.”
Before Ruben learns to sign, Ahmed played his scenes while wearing “audio blockers”: hearing aids that had been tweaked to emit white noise in order to simulate deafness, and which Marder could activate remotely, without warning.
A self-confessed control freak, Ahmed found this supremely unnerving — and liberating, too. “I’m usually the precision-painting type, doing my research, all very cerebral and academic,” he says. “But the really
interesting things happen when you’re off-balance.”
Here is another of Sound of Metal’s destabilising features: Ruben is — to put it bluntly — a hunk, which is not a quality Western cinema usually ascribes to actors of South Asian descent. Marder recalls Ahmed telling him stories on set about the prejudice he experienced growing up Pakistani in northwest London in the 1980s and 90s — “being called ‘dirty’ at school, and so on. So to have him play a romantic lead is a real point of pride.”
As with Ahmed’s dark, unsettling 2020 film Mogul Mowgli — an unintended companion piece to Sound of Metal, about a rapper on the cusp of stardom struck down by a mysterious illness — working with Marder allowed him “to tell a story drawn from my own experiences”.
“I’d always tried to justify my decision to go into the arts by saying I was doing it to stretch culture, but I had started to realise I’d just been contorting myself into pre-existing moulds,” he says. “So I wanted to dig it all up and put it on the table, because we never get to do that. And maybe that’s what stretching culture is, as opposed to popping up in this or that and doing a turn.”
Is he referring to his supporting role in the Rogue One ensemble, or his villain in Venom, the Spider-Man spin-off? “It can be a cumulative thing,” he says. “John Boyega’s in Star Wars, and he’s also in Small Axe.” Small Axe is Steve McQueen’s acclaimed series of films about 20thcentury Black British life.
Ahmed talks about these studio juggernauts in the language of personal training regimes.
“They develop a different kind of technical stamina, and I wanted to grow those muscles. It’s a different animal, — a kind of artistic collaboration negotiated by committee.”
Does he see himself returning to those kinds of roles? “Yes, if the next opportunity for growth is being on something like that. We’re at a place where the bar is quite low in terms of having really diverse representation on screen. Me doing a toothpaste commercial would probably stretch culture at the moment.”
It’s worth remembering just how much less true this was only two decades ago, when Ahmed left school (Merchant Taylors’, a highly selective boys’ school, which he attended on a scholarship) to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, then acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
At that time, he recalls, “We had a whole swathe of British Asian creativity: Talvin Singh winning the Mercury Prize; Nitin Sawhney being nominated; Bally Sagoo going to number one; Goodness Gracious Me on TV, Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham in cinemas.” Then came the events of September 11, 2001, “and multiculturalism just kind of imploded. These communities lost control of their own narrative, and instead had to react to one that had been imposed.”
This was the jobs market into which the young Ahmed emerged. His first big screen role was in The Road to Guantanamo, Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 docudrama about the Tipton Three. On the way home from its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Ahmed was detained at Luton Airport and questioned by police for an hour under counter-terrorism laws. It was in this climate that he initially turned down Four Lions, until Chris Morris talked him round.
His time at public school and Oxford turned out to be an ideal grounding for a career in the British film industry, where “a knowledge of how to navigate rooms where you feel like an impostor” is crucial. “You learn how to shape-shift and navigate landscapes that are not of your own making. It teaches you to leave a part of yourself at the door. And it’s very empowering and very dangerous to become good at that.”
All three, he continues, felt like “repetitions of the same pattern: first feeling, ‘Oh s***, I don’t belong here,’ then realising the place where you stick out is the place where you should stick it out. It’s exhausting and also gratifying. I think I like a bit of a fight.”
Even now, he’s bothered by impostor syndrome — the feeling that every time he makes a film, “I might get a tap on the shoulder, and be told I’ve been found out. There’s probably some good in that it keeps you on your toes,” he reflects uncertainly, before laughing: “Honestly, I still haven’t got a f***ing clue what I’m doing. But I do think I now have a clearer idea of who I am.” —
Telegraph Group Ltd
‘The bar is quite low in terms of having really diverse representation on screen. Me doing a toothpaste commercial would probably stretch culture.’ Riz Ahmed