TOTAL FILM INTERVIEW
RIZ AHMED
Riz Ahmed on Star Wars, Shifty and learning to sign for latest role in Sound
Of Metal.
British multihyphenate Riz Ahmed has been consistently impressive in incendiary indies and bigger blockbuster fare. But as he takes on one of his most powerful roles yet as a drummer losing his hearing in Sound Of Metal, he tells Total Film that he’s just getting started...
Riz Ahmed might be one of the hardestworking British actors in the business today. Since breaking out in the mid-’00s, you might have seen him in everything from thought-provoking indies (Shifty, Ill Manors) to top telly (Dead Set, The Night Of, Girls), the biggest of blockbusters (Jason Bourne, Rogue One, Venom) and the talking-point comedy of the past 20 years (Four Lions). Alongside his acting career, Ahmed has revealed another side of himself as a rapper, releasing material solo and as part of Swet Shop Boys (it was his track ‘Post 9/11 Blues’ that caught the attention of Chris Morris).
In his latest film, Sound Of Metal, Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, a drummer in a band with his girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). Gigging and living out of a tour van, their free, nomadic lifestyle is upended when Ruben suddenly suffers severe hearing loss, and has no choice but to check himself into a home for deaf addicts. There he bonds with an older mentor, Joe (played Paul Raci, a child of deaf adults and sign-language expert). Written and directed by Darius Marder in his feature film debut, Sound Of Metal is particularly notable for its extremely immersive sound design. It’s a profound piece of work, providing Ahmed with one of his best roles yet.
“I just fell in love with the script without any context,” Ahmed tells TF, speaking over Zoom from the location of the currently filming (Covid-secure, of course) Invasion. “And then I met Darius, and I just really fell in love with his energy.” It was a chance to return to his acting roots. “Having spent so much of my career before The Night Of making these lower-budget, British indie films that had been tremendous growing experiences, I guess I wanted to reconnect to that energy but take it up to something more intense.” While set in a very specific milieu – the collision between the grungy travelling musician scene, and the deaf community – it’s a universal story.
Born in London in 1982 to a British-Pakistani family, Ahmed has never shied away from addressing big themes of race, religion and politics in either side of his career, and many pivotal early roles directly examined the Muslim experience post-9/11. But he has also used his voice to increase the visibility of often marginalised voice sin the industry. In 2016, he wrote an essay for the Guardian, ‘Typecast As A Terrorist’, in which he laid out three stages of portrayals for ethnic minorities. Stage one is “the twodimensional stereotype”, stage two is “the subversive portrayal, taking place on “ethnic” terrain but aiming to challenge existing stereotypes”, and stage three is “the Promised Land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race”.
While things have improved in terms of the roles he’s offered, Ahmed isn’t resting on his laurels. “Actually, it’s interesting to see a new generation say that representation isn’t enough,” he muses. “A seat at the table isn’t enough. There’s being allowed in the room, and then there’s owning some of the room, and there’s having the power to bring other people into the room as well. There’s always work to be done...”
With the drums and sign language, did Sound Of Metal require the most intense preparation you’ve done for a role?
It was about five hours of lessons a day, every day for seven months, so that I could get to a point of fluency in the American Sign Language. It was for real. When we were on set for that whole part of the shoot, we were [using] it. And I think with the drums, you know, Darius and I both being in love with the music, we just didn’t want to cheat that. I didn’t realise that because we’re shooting on film, you prepare for the gigs for seven months, and go to a real club in Boston with a real crowd and play a real gig with Olivia [Cooke], who’s a complete star – and then we get two takes of it after seven months of prep. I think that really brought something to the project. It constantly felt like a bit of a high-wire act. It just focused everyone’s minds. We didn’t have a chance to overthink anything. You just had to go for the gut, after doing a lot of prep, which is really quite liberating in a way.
Did you learn anything that surprised you about the deaf community?
Many things. I guess the biggest surprise was just how… having spent some time being lucky enough to be welcomed into the deaf community, particularly by my sign instructor, Jeremy Stone, who I named the character after, is that… once you’ve had that connection, it’s just crazy how segregated the two cultures are. That just boils down to the hearing community, and arrogance, and narrowness, and overlooking deaf culture and the tremendous talent and richness and uniqueness of that perspective. You just realise what a tragic waste that is. So what Jeremy really explained to me was that there’s a trope in the deaf community that hearing people are emotionally repressed, because we hide behind words. I found that to be true in a way. I found myself feeling a lot more emotionally moved than I would have if I had just been speaking about it. Jeremy
explained to me that it’s because when you communicate with your whole body like that, you are inhabiting what you are saying in a different way. You have a different depth of connection to the way you are communicating. I kind of feel like that experience with the deaf community taught me the true meaning of communication. I think it opened me up in different ways, as an actor and as a person.
This is Darius Marder’s first non-documentary film. What do you look for when you’re working with a debut director?
Darius didn’t feel like a debut director. He’s an actual filmmaker because of his experience from documentaries, and also, you know, as an amazing screenwriter. I look for the same thing as with any director, which is that they have a really great sense of the scene. And that is tempered with an openness and a collaborative spirit, and also, you know, recalibrating the vision once the film is alive and breathing. Because when that happens, the film starts telling you what it is. You don’t tell the film what it is. You want that balance between someone with a clarity of vision, but not such a tight clutch where you’re strangling the hold on what they feel the film has to be, and they choke the life out of it. You want a living animal. You don’t want a stuffed animal.
Sound Of Metal follows on the heels of Mogul Mowgli in the UK. Do you see them as kind of companion pieces?
They weren’t ever conceived of in that way. I understand that there are similar themes like the journey of an artist who is confronted with a crisis that forces them to reassess who they are. But I guess at its heart, every story is about trying to answer the question of “Who am I?” Every story is about leaving home in order to return to yourself with a clearer answer to that question. You wouldn’t believe it, but I never even thought about the similarities of their arcs. And that’s because they sound more similar on paper than I think they are as films. I feel like, in a way, they’re very independent.
You blended two passions in that role: rapping and acting. Does one have your heart more?
Not really. I think we all have different sides to who we are. I don’t know if we could say that there’s one side of you that is more you than another side. They’re less things I do, and more part of who I am, or part of the language of how I express myself. I think for many people, we have so many different sides to who we are. I think that increasingly, identity is such a complex thing. I think the days of asking people to choose whether they are, you know, an actor or a rapper, or whether they’re British or Nigerian, or if they’re mixed-heritage or white or Black – I think those things are, I’m glad to say, kind of dying away. I think we’re starting to embrace more of the complexity of who we are. I say we’re all starting to embrace it. I think there’s also a big push against that, isn’t there? It can be scary and unsettling for people to not have clear boxes to put themselves in, and clear labels to put others in. Life can be more comfortable when you divide people up into “us and them”. I guess one of the
IF YOU’RE NOT ON THE PATH YOU WANT TO BE ON, THAT’S NOT SUCCESS
things that attracted me to [Sound Of Metal] is this idea that we think of identity as such a fixed thing, particularly and increasingly, actually, in this era of identity politics. It’s scary times. It’s divided times – “us and them”. “I’m this, you’re that.” But I thought it was interesting to play a character whose identity is, like all of ours, actually completely up for grabs. So many of the things that define us are contingencies of circumstances. They can shift at any moment. I think that’s an idea that so many of us can relate to now in the context of the pandemic where many of us have been forced to step away from the daily routines or activities or jobs that we thought defined us, and it’s forced us to actually dig a big deeper, and go, “Well, who am I underneath all those things that I thought gave me identity or purpose or value?”
Are you generally quite instinctive when it comes to choosing roles?
It’s a combination of things. It’s like any decision. If you have a gut reaction that is usually quite solid, you learn to listen to it. But I think there is an important moment of stopping and thinking, and interrogating things a little bit. Something I try and think about is, ‘Does it stretch me? Does it stretch culture a little bit? Can it contribute to the community in some way and break down the idea of “us and them”?’ The whole point of all stories is that there is no “us and them”. It’s just us, you know? I think with Sound Of Metal, honestly, it was just a gut emotional connection to this character and then to the script, really, and to Darius. Whereas with Mogul Mowgli, it was more a personal desire to articulate a particular experience that we actually don’t see much on screen. I tried with Bassam [Tariq, director and co-writer] to create a cinematic language that could house our story, rather than just placing our story in the refurbished version of classic western filmmaking. But I do think, more and more, there is a wisdom in our gut, isn’t there? If only we could train ourselves to listen to it, and cut through the noise of what we think we should do, and what other people are doing.
Have you found the roles you’ve been offered of the years changed? Do you feel any closer to that ‘Promised Land’ you wrote about a few years ago?
I think they changed, yeah. There’s still a lot of changes to be made. It’s always too easy to draw conclusions from a handful of exceptions to the rule. We do have more people who are more visible from more diverse backgrounds within the business and within our culture. I think that’s great. I still think that, overall, we haven’t kind of erased some of those imbalances. There’s still a lot of work to be done, for sure.
Thinking about turning-point roles, The Road To Guantanamo must have been an intense first film experience?
It was. It was an amazing experience. Driving along the Khyber Pass with those Afghan tribesmen packing AK47s at 80 miles an hour off a cliff edge, and Michael Winterbottom throwing up into a bucket that he’s just had to take a shit in because he’s got food poisoning, and he’s just rolling on it. It was just wild, man. It was the best kind of experience. It was completely immersive. I’m indebted to Michael for giving me my first break, and also working with him again on Trishna. It’s a very freewheeling way of working, which I think has massively shaped my approach to performance. It’s been more about trying to find moments of freedom and truth, rather than providing people with a polished and shaped performance. I guess that whole experience, and the context of it, and also what the story was about, and spending time with the Tipton Three – with Shafiq Rasul especially – it provided me with a bit of grounding and perspective on what this medium can do, and what it can be about. And I was proud, I guess, to start my career off with a project that had something to say, that was trying to offer a different perspective to the quite toxic dominant narratives we had at that point.
Shifty felt like another breakout role for you. Did it feel like it was going to be special?
Yeah, very much so. When I came from The Road To Guantanamo, we got held at Luton Airport by a special branch, and I decided to write a rap song, a satirical rap song, about it. So I went to Mat [Whitecross, co-director of The Road To Guantanamo] and said, “Can you do a music video?” Mat
I THINK THAT INCREASINGLY, IDENTITY IS SUCH A COMPLEX THING
and his friend Eran Creevy directed the ‘Post 9/11 Blues’ music video together, and it was one of their first videos. And that’s how I met Eran Creevy. And on that shoot, he said, “I’ve got this script. Do you want to come and read it?” I went in and auditioned for him, and we did it. It was, again, one of those experiences, like Ill Manors, like The Road To Guantanamo – these kind of micro-budget films. We shot it in 18 days for 100 grand. It just creates this amazing atmosphere of camaraderie. It’s difficult hours and tricky conditions, but you know that everyone’s there for the right reasons.
Do you tend to feel most comfortable in those low-budget spaces?
No, not at all. It’s not about comfort. It’s like anything; when you’re starting out, you look back fondly on those times when you were roughing it, and everyone was kind of all in it together, and doing it for the love. It’s not that I feel uncomfortable on those bigger movies. There’s just more people on them, and more moving parts. So there’s less of a sense of camaraderie and opportunity to connect with people. And I guess that something I value a lot is just connection. There’s depth of connection with your collaborators. Perhaps on something like The Avengers where you’ve got the same people working together on six movies, and living together in the same city, perhaps they also had an incredible depth of connection. Everyone on The Lord Of The Rings went and got a tattoo. They must have really bonded. I just think that it’s about the depth of your connection with your collaborators. It can really bring about something special. I’m not saying it’s impossible to have it on those bigger films. I’m just saying it can sometimes be a bit trickier.
Four Lions really brought you to wider attention, but you weren’t familiar with Chris Morris beforehand. Did you have qualms about approaching a subject like that with humour?
I got to know Chris because of ‘Post 9/11 Blues’ as well. He watched that video and contacted me. I met up with him, and just got to know him on a friend level. Every two or three months, we’d meet up for a coffee and had a chat. I put him in touch with some of my friends up North who became his researchers. We would just check in for a chat. It was in three years that he became an expert on this whole area, on this very human level. He’d correct me on my Islamic knowledge and stuff! [laughs] To be honest, I just thought
he was just a guy who I was kind of mates with. One day he just presented me a script, and I’d almost forgotten that he’d been writing one. By then, I knew him, I trusted him, but I didn’t want to take the role. So I turned it down because I’d just done Shifty, and I thought, ‘I’m glad to have done The Road To Guantanamo. I glad to have done Britz. But I feel like I don’t just want to restrict my work to trying to do this thing which I think is an important thing of trying to speak truth to power, and put a different perspective against these sometimes quite dominant narratives that can be unhelpful and simplistic.’ But I wanted to also just do stuff like, ‘Hey, Shifty is just a guy. It’s not about the post-9/11 landscape.’ And so I turned it down. And then Chris said to me, “Look, man, I’m not trying to take the piss. I think this would be good.” Honestly, I thought, ‘I like this guy. Who knows if anyone will even see this? Let’s give it a go.’ So I just did it with no expectations. We just did it, again, just because we believed in Chris, and it was a pretty funny script. To see almost the significance that that film has taken on for certain people, and for a whole generation – so many people stop me to say it’s their favourite-ever film. Especially in the UK. It’s kind of mindblowing, I just feel so lucky to have been part of it, and so lucky that he convinced me to do it.
Chris Morris said Four Lions would be a step towards a brown James Bond….
What he meant was that this isn’t a film where brown people are villains. It may be about post-9/11 war-on-terror kind-of stuff, but this is a film where you’re rooting for the brown characters in it. The brown characters in it are not being demonised. That was what the conversation was.
So, do you think we are closer to that point?
Who knows, man? Who knows? [laughs]
What film do you get most recognised for now?
I don’t know. It really shifts from context to context. In America, sometimes people might shout across the street, “Yo, Nas, did you do it?” – because of The Night Of. If I’m in somewhere like Brooklyn or something, people will be like, “Dude, I love Nightcrawler” – because it’s a slightly alternative, cult kind-of little movie. But if I’m in East London, it might be more Four Lions or whatever. If I’m meeting someone around kids, then
obviously it’ll be Star Wars or there’s Venom. I guess it’s a mixed bag. I just like mixing it up.
You had that run a couple of years ago when you were in a few bigger films like Rogue One, Jason Bourne and Venom. Was that a coincidence, or were you looking to try out blockbuster material?
You want to have different experiences. That’s how you grow. When I was doing The Night Of, I didn’t have any experience doing a studio film, and then I got to do Star Wars. And then as soon as I started on Star Wars, I think Frank Marshall, who is Kathy Kennedy’s partner, had the idea to cast me in Bourne. So suddenly I’m shooting Bourne and Star Wars at the same time. I had that experience, and then, out of nowhere, The Night Of blew up, which was, again, totally unexpected. We didn’t even know if we’d get to make that because of all the tragedy around trying to make it. We shot the pilot in 2012 – it was two years before we shot the rest of the series because of James Gandolfini’s death, and also because HBO, at one point, didn’t want to make it, and then [Robert] De Niro was going to do it, and then he stepped out. It was like an accidental goal. It was a very difficult shoot. No one saw that coming. So I guess, after that, I got offered Venom. Sometimes, they can build off each other, those kind of gigs. It’s just like anything: the last thing people see you in is the kind-of box maybe people put you in. So it’s always up to you to try and guide your path, and not just be carried along on a conveyor belt, and then kind of step out, and reset, or take a left or right turn. It’s something that Chadwick Boseman spoke about a lot, actually: Don’t let other people define success for you. If you’re not on the path that you want to be on, that’s not success. And if you’re on the path that you want to be on regardless of far along that path you are, that is success.
Do you feel like you’ve been able to have some kind of control over that path?
None of us really have any control. I was listening to this conversation with Maya Angelou and James Baldwin the other day. Someone sent it to me. I thought it was really inspiring. He was saying, “The older I get, the less I know, and it’s a tremendous relief, actually, to realise how little you know.” So you don’t really control your path, but I guess you can try to listen a bit more to your gut. The best creativity happens when you surrender your ego, and let go of control, and let go of an idea of who you think you are, or who the character is. You let the film tell you. You ride the wave. It’s about surrendering ego, and surrendering your idea of yourself. You’ve got to make sure your creative animal is nourished and well-treated and satisfied and able to follow its own curiosity, like a bloodhound just running wild and sniffing out things, rather than putting it on a leash and making it perform, and presenting a circus act.
Having done loads of different stuff, is there anything you’d still like to do that you haven’t done yet?
MAKE SURE YOUR CREATIVE ANIMAL IS NOURISHED
Man, are you kidding me? There’s so much to do! Honestly, I feel like I’m just getting started. I feel like I’ve been so lucky to have been able to work with great people, on some great projects that people connected with, and that stayed with some people. I really feel like I’ve been learning in public, and I hope I just continue to have this chance to learn. I just feel like I’m kind of starting to take my creative animal off its leash.
SOUND OF METAL WILL OPEN IN CINEMAS ON 29 JANUARY.