What lies beyond the fortress of identity and representation? This is a question I’ve long hoped to ask Riz Ahmed. It’s 10am on a Monday and the Oscar-winning actor and rapper is dialling in from Northern California, where he’s spent most of the past six months. He has been working on a longstanding project, one, he shares that has been close to his heart—a recently announced comedy series picked up by Amazon Prime Video, in which he plays the role of struggling actor Shah Latif.
His voice—sharp, raspy, with a gentle lilt—is laced with the remnants of a busy week. Yet, he is characteristically affable and warm. For the past 18 years, Riz’s career has been steeped in the heavy tapestry of cultural portrayal, delicately unveiled by his compendium.
A graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, his career kicked off with a role as Shafiq Rasul in Michael Winter bottom’s docudrama film, The Road to Guantánamo . The plot? A tale of three young British men wrongfully detained by the US after a visit to Afghanistan in 2001. A wave of parts, both satirical and archetypal of his British-Pakistani heritage, followed—a rite of passage Riz describes as stages one and two of ethnic portrayals in the book The Good Immigrant .
For him, this looked like being cast as the aspiring suicide bomber Omar in Chris Morris’s comedy feature Four Lions and finance professor Changez Khan in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist . Now, at 41 years old, Riz has rea.
