Eight years ago, Riz Ahmed found his Bond song. Or rather, it found him. This was a time, remember, when the 007 rumour mill was in constant motion, each news cycle conjuring a new successor to Daniel Craig. Ahmed, according to the headlines, was firmly in the race. A decade into his career, the actor had already earned his blockbuster stripes in Jason Bourne, Rogue One and the soon-to-be-released Venom, and banked prestige kudos with an Emmy win for crime drama The Night Of. Enough star power for bookies to start calculating his odds. In September 2018, his face was plastered across the cover of GQ with the headline: “The first brown Bond?”
At about the same time, singer Jorja Smith’s manager gave him a call. “He said, ‘Listen, mate, when you get to play Bond, I’ve got the perfect song,” says Ahmed, fizzing with energy. But make no mistake: this excitement isn’t about his Bond potential. Much more thrilling to the actor is where the track eventually ended up. Kept under lock and key for nearly a decade, Smith’s new single, Price Of It All, has just made its debut on Ahmed’s new TV show Bait, which he created, co-wrote and stars in.
In the years since those initial Bond rumours, Ahmed has mostly shaken off the association and transformed himself into a critically acclaimed indie darling. Take his Oscar-nominated turn in 2019’s Sound of Metal, for instance, where he played a metal drummer who loses his hearing, or his timely short film, The Long Goodbye, in which he wrestled with Britain’s racism problem — earning him a gold statuette at the 2022 Academy Awards.
But in Bait, Ahmed is reminding us of his Bond-fever era. It’s all a bit meta: the plot follows struggling actor Shah Latif, whose life is upended when the tabloids latch onto the idea that he could be cast as Britain’s next smooth-talking superspy. Chaos ensues — at home, at industry events, at auditions, but mostly in his own mind. He spends the majority of his time seeking advice from a severed pig’s head voiced by a foul-mouthed Patrick Stewart. Goldfinger, this is not.
So, what is it? Autofiction? Satire? Surreal psychodrama? A chance for Ahmed to don the Bond suit at last, if only in Shah’s imaginary action sequences? The reality is something a little more slippery and existential, “a subversive comedy that takes place within a playground of shame,” as Ahmed puts it. Bait, which started out as a series of stories and anecdotes from his own life, confronts the gap between a person’s outward perception and inner world; the man who could be Bond and the anxious wreck who is struggling under the weight of those expectations.
“It’s about the deficit we feel in ourselves when we fall short of the archetypal projections and how, when we feel like we’re not enough, we can do too much to overcompensate and prove ourselves,” says Ahmed. And, he insists, the pressures of social media have made this knotty concept of social performance acutely relatable to everyone. “We’re all someone different on our Instagram feed to what’s happening just out of frame,” he continues. “Life feels like you’re constantly performing, auditioning, trying to be this perfect version of yourself. What better symbol for that is there than James Bond?”
“We’re all someone different on our Instagram feed to what’s happening just out of frame”
Still, Ahmed is perhaps more familiar with that life-is-one-big-audition feeling than most. At 43, the actor has climbed from his working-class upbringing in Wembley to the upper echelons of Hollywood, bouncing from institutions where, in the past, he has said he constantly felt like an outsider.
Born to first-generation Pakistani immigrants — his father a shipping merchant, his mother staying at home to care for three children — Ahmed won a scholarship for Northwood’s £10,000-a-term Merchant Taylors’ School, before going on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. Then, drama school, which he ultimately dropped out of to shoot his first film, 2006’s The Road to Guantánamo, about the wrongful imprisonment of the Tipton Three.
That same year, he released his debut single as a rapper, Post 9/11 Blues, catching the attention of comedian Chris Morris, who recruited him for the terrorism satire Four Lions. From then on, not a year has gone by where Ahmed hasn’t graced our screens, whether battling it out in Venom or fighting prejudice in projects such as The Long Goodbye.
Riz Ahmed by numbers
2017 is the year he was nominated in Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world
1 Oscar win, for his short, The Long Goodbye. He was also nominated for Best Actor for Sound of Metal
He was the 1st Asian male to win a lead acting Emmy, for The Night Of
2 solo albums recorded, plus one as part of Swet Shop Boys
1 research method named after him. The Riz Test is used to quantify Muslim representation in film and television
If you’ve seen the latter, or listened to the accompanying album of the same name, you’ll know Ahmed isn’t afraid to reckon with race. The film shows a Muslim family become the victims of Britain’s rising far-Right. “I spit my truth and it’s brown,” raps Ahmed as they are violently removed from their home.
Indeed, Bait inevitably touches on themes of race, too. (“By so desperately pursuing Bond, an icon of the white establishment, Shah Latif is exchanging his political art for vanilla distraction,” sneers an ex-girlfriend-turned-newspaper columnist.) But Ahmed is keen to make sure this is not reduced to a project that is simply about identity.
“The magical thing about stories [is they help you relate] to something you’ve never experienced. I’ve never been the Queen of England, but I was binging The Crown,” he says. “You recognise yourself in strangers, which makes you realise that underneath the differences that seem to separate us, we’re the same.” Ahmed’s goal, he explains frenetically, is to “stretch and expand archetypes” like Bond, but also “offer new templates and moulds” to audiences.
“It’s not about racial specificity. It’s about vulnerability”
It’s tempting to read this as a nod to diversity, but the actor pushes back. “Yes, who can play these roles is one thing, but that’s less interesting to me,” he says. “It’s about nuance and complexity. The more personal you make something, the more people can relate to it. It’s not about racial specificity. It’s about vulnerability.”
That is also what motivated his recent retelling of Hamlet, which transposed Shakespeare’s tragedy to present-day London. Released in February, the film was directed by Aneil Karia, Ahmed’s collaborator on The Long Goodbye. Although the story might seem worlds apart from the black comedy of Bait, Ahmed finds kinship between the two characters through their shared emotional turmoil.
“I’m not interested in the Hamlet who’s cleverest in the room, spouting commanding poetry,” he says. “I’m interested in the Hamlet who’s stressed, lost, frayed and fragile, who keeps talking because he can’t find the right words.”
Mental health is clearly a concern for Ahmed — not necessarily in a solemn way, but more as a creative springboard. A vehicle, once again, to make people feel seen. “Anxiety is fast rising,” he says of the condition, which affects about a third of British adults. “How do you talk about these weighty things in a way that isn’t didactic? Instead of trying to give answers, asking questions?” Short answer: comedy. In fact, it was through observing the absurdity of his own life that he arrived at his lightbulb moment. “You often don’t experience mental health crises in the sombre, sermonising way that it’s spoken about,” he says. “The experience is messy, chaotic and actually kind of funny.”
Case in point: while doing a recent Zoom interview to promote Bait, Ahmed crashed his car — a consequence of trying to appease a traffic warden who had clocked him double-parked down an east London side street, which itself was a consequence of him running late. “What do I do? Do I own it? Do I close the distance between my public and private self?” he says, recounting his misfortune with glee. “Of course not. I go off video and try to continue the interview while haggling insurance details with the guy I just crashed into. It’s hilarious!”
Funny bone well and truly activated, Ahmed is now looking ahead to his next challenge. This weekend, he’ll address the nation as the celebrity guest host on Saturday Night Live UK, the freshly minted British spin-off of America’s legendary late-night sketch show. Yes, he watched the first episode, which aired on March 21. Yes, he thinks they killed it.
“That Princess Diana?” he says of cast member Jack Shep’s impression during a David Attenborough dinner party sketch. “Scene stealing. How can we create as many opportunities to bring back Princess Diana on that show?” As we speak, Ahmed is preparing to spend all week in the writers’ room dreaming up his own gags. Perhaps he can take matters into his own hands. “Exactly. I’m mates with Emma Corrin [who played Diana in The Crown], so I’ve got to get some pointers.”
Raised on a diet of Harry Enfield, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The Fast Show and Goodness Gracious Me, trying his hand at live comedy feels like a return to his roots. “Those shows had a bigger influence on me than possibly any film,” he says. “You can say more in comedy. You can be uglier, more vulnerable, more provocative and more playful.” He also knows that few things bring the nation together quite like taking the piss.
“That’s the most unifying thing about being British: the NHS and our sense of humour”
“That’s the most unifying thing about being British: the NHS and our sense of humour. The show’s already different to the US version — we’re doing our own thing, unapologetically.” There’s a lightness to Ahmed that might surprise those more familiar with his weightier projects. But speaking to him, it’s clear that intensity and his joie de vivre go hand in hand. Every experience is an opportunity to tell a story, to connect, to spill his psyche onto the screen and practice “radical vulnerability”.
Once upon a time, his dedication to his craft could easily spiral into obsession: two years after wrapping The Night Of and winning an Emmy for his performance, he’d still wake up in the middle of the night to rerun scenes in his bathroom mirror. These days, he’s grounded by his wife, American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, and their young child, whose age and gender are kept private.
“Now, when I go home, I just want to be with my wife and my kid — that’s the highlight of every day. It’s such a gift to be able to let the other stuff melt away,” he says. “Your art can only be as big as your heart. The best kind of creativity is aligned with the best way of living.”
What does that look like? “Being receptive, not focusing on yourself, or being too self-regarding or self-conscious. You have to surrender to the flow of the situation.” Ahmed lets out a soft chuckle. “Kids teach you that — they’re a law unto themselves. My kid’s my biggest teacher.”
Later this year, Ahmed will star in Alejandro G Iñárritu’s next film, Digger, alongside Tom Cruise. But right now, he’s not looking too far ahead into the future. As the response to Bait starts to pour in and fans confirm he has achieved his mission of helping people see themselves in Shah Latif, the actor is simply riding the emotional high of a job well done.
Still, you have to wonder, after rattling from Shakespeare to sketch shows at breakneck speed, is there anything else left on his creative to-do list? “I think I need to sleep for a bit!” laughs Ahmed. “I haven’t tried that for a while. That’s truly groundbreaking.”
All episodes of Bait are available on Prime Video
