Riz Ahmed is one of the year’s breakout stars.
Actor was barely known just a few months ago
NEW YORK — The music festival poster listed the performers in the way that musical festival posters do, a run-through 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 neo-traditionalist Arooj Aftab. All were part of the lineup for the Asian-centric Function fest that took place at a Brooklyn bar on a 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 conscience-stricken 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 percent 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 workingclass Wembley — and is a medium-hopping artist as likely to sing about other-
ness as he is to embody it on screen — 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 insideroutsider.”
Ahmed left the gritty neighborhood 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 color as it explored the worlds of Asia and the Middle East, but also in the evolution of his own creative identity.
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.”
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-heor-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. But it is a nice side effect for people to see characters they don’t otherwise experience.”