Riz Ahmed’s profile heats up with major roles
TV and film actor doesn’t mind being pegged as Hollywood’s go-to Muslim, but now he’s outgrowing that stereotype
NEWYORK— The music festival poster listed the performers in the way that musical festival posters do, a runthrough of names and styles united by a theme. There was the Bhangra mistress DJ Rekha, the punk act Kominas, the post-racial hip-hop artist Riz MC, the Pakistani neotraditionalist Arooj Aftab.
All were part of the lineup for the Asian-centric Function fest that took place at a Brooklyn bar last Sunday night.
One of those acts, though, was not your typical musician: Riz MC is actually the British actor Riz Ahmed. Shortly after he was set to take the stage in his guise as a smooth-grooved but provocatively political rapper, his face would appear on TV screens everywhere as Nasir Khan, the stoic, tortured son of a New York cabbie and accused murderer in HBO’s summer breakout series The Night Of.
At the same moment, multiplex audiences were turning out to see Ahmed as Aaron Killoor, a consciencestricken Silicon Valley mogul, in Jason Bourne. The London-based Ahmed had actually hopped a flight to Function after promoting Bourne in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, appearing at an HBO Television Critics Association panel to talk up The Night Of, and hitting a round of Hollywood meetings in which he courted offers on upcoming projects. Most of the people he met with were unaware of his musical moonlighting.
“I kind of am proud of the fact,” Ahmed said just before he stepped into one of those meetings last Friday afternoon, “that 90 per cent of the people that cast me as an actor have no idea that I do music. And vice versa.”
Every once in a while an actor blows up at seemingly the exact right time. Ahmed, 33, has been toiling in the film world for more than a decade; his first major role was as a prisoner in Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo in 2006. But in the space of a few months he has gone from barely known to nearly ubiquitous, a fate that will be sealed when he appears as Rebel pilot Bodhi Rook in the Star Wars spinoff Rogue One later this year. Ahmed’s fame comes at a moment when debates about immigration and Islam have roiled the U.S. election; when questions of outsiderness have polarized his native Europe; when the issue of celebrities’ political outspokenness remains charged; and when, as his music career underscores, the idea of simply choosing one art form and sticking with it is a less appealing or tenable career path.
Ahmed was born to Pakistani immigrants in London’s working-class Wembley and is a medium-hopping artist as likely to sing about otherness as he is to embody it onscreen, which puts him at the fulcrum of all these trends.
“As a teenager, I had a lot of moments of ‘Who the hell am I; what are my values?’ There were so many different sides of me; I felt like a kind of insider-outsider,” Ahmed said. “But I’ve found that there’s also something very enriching about being the insider-outsider.”
Ahmed left the gritty neighbourhood of his youth and made his way into a different world via a scholarship to an elite high school. He eventually attended Oxford, studying politics and philosophy. As he began shifting into acting in his 20s, he soon found his background an advantage — in part for a film industry interested in faces of colour as it explored the worlds of Asia and the Middle East, but also in the evolution of his own creative identity.
Viewers of The Night Of will find echoes of Ahmed’s own childhood in the Nasir character, a 23-year-old who is in the process of studying hard to transcend his background before matters go awry. The recent back-and-forth between presidential nominee Donald Trump and Khizr and Ghazala Khan — like both Ahmed and Nasir’s parents, Pakistani immigrants to the West — further underscores the timely desire of immigrants not to be constrained by their backgrounds.
Ahmed spent weeks in neighbourhoods such as Jackson Heights, Queens, to burrow deeper into the show’s world.
Still, he cautions against inferring too many similarities between person and portrayal.
“Where I grew up and the Jackson Heights you see on the show are actually very different places in a lot of ways,” he said. “The danger is looking at them and thinking they’re the same. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
What he’s not avoiding is politics. Ahmed frequently tweets news-related opinions and actively lobbied on behalf of Britain’s “remain” movement, making a pro-immigrant argument that was unafraid of stepping on a social third rail.
On Englistan, his Brexit-era mixtape that has surged in popularity since dropping in April, he laces a plea for multicultural tolerance with a more scabrous subversion of the English idyll. (“God save the queen/ Nah she ain’t mates with me/But she keeps my paper green/Plus we are neighbours see/On this little island/ Where we’re all surviving/Politeness mixed with violence/This is England.”)
He says he has not had thoughts about toning down his speech.
“When I was growing up, there was value in an actor being an enigma, this notion of ‘less is more,’” he said. “But I don’t think that’s true now. You can put yourself out there and still disappear into a character. Realness is more.”
British fans haven’t yet been exposed to The Night Of — HBO has yet to air it across the pond — leading to Ahmed feeling a little jolted as Americans have begun to stop him on the street in the three weeks since the show debuted.
At the Bourne premiere in Las Vegas, he was still able to walk past a chunk of the red carpet unfettered as Matt Damon and other co-stars were more heavily pestered. As Night Of builds to its eighth-episode finale on Aug. 28, that’s certain to change.
If there’s any annoyance at being cast as the misunderstood Muslim — he also starred as the rational voice in the suicide-bomber comedy Four Lions and the title role in Mira Nair’s is-he-or-isn’t-he jihadi drama The Reluctant Fundamentalist — Ahmed doesn’t show it.
“I never felt I was being typecast. Being an actor is about stretching empathy; it’s about making something universal by being specific,” said the actor, who can speak in wellmeaning if occasionally earnest tones. “But it is a nice side effect for people to see characters they don’t otherwise experience.”
The Night Of role came about because creators Steven Zaillian and Richard Price decided to switch the cabdriver family from Anglo, as it was in the British miniseries on which it’s loosely based, to Pakistani.
That said, there are signs that Ahmed is outgrowing his role as a go-to Muslim, that disconcerting Hollywood trend in which producers settle on just a few actors of colour to portray a wide variety of parts.
He was actually cast in and initially began making The Night Of in 2012 (the project was put on hold with the death of former star James Gandolfini). His role in the more recent Bourne has no ethnic overtones and his turn in Rogue One does not seem laden with them either. (While plot specifics are elusive, Ahmed says the film is “almost like a war movie, where characters have rich pasts and murky motivations.”)
In late 2013, Ahmed began shooting Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, as the sidekick Rick to Jake Gyllenhaal’s sociopathic Lou. In retrospect, it was the beginning of a new chapter in which his ethnicity made no statement — or, rather, its nonfactor made its own kind of statement. He had to win over Gilroy, who initially thought of Rick as an American role.
If anything, Ahmed said he likes playing roles outside his background: as Rick; as Bourne’s Killoor, which found him talking to experts on metadata in conversations he (mostly) understood; as even a rapper at a New York music festival. “The best creativity happens when it’s not about you, when you can open the door to someone else,” he said. “That’s when it can become transcendent.”