Riz Ahmed takes on his inner critic

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. A struggling British-Pakistani actor lands the audition of a lifetime as James Bond. Word gets out, and the internet goes wild. And suddenly, his life starts to resemble the very character he's auditioning to play. He's in a chase sequence, except for he's not chasing a villain. He's chasing acceptance. That's the setup for Bait, the prime video series that is part spy thriller, part family comedy, and part psychological unraveling. My guest today, Riz Ahmed, created, wrote, and produced the series. He also stars as the lead character, Shah Latif. Now he's been nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for the role. I spoke with him earlier this year when the series was released. Bait opens with Shah in a tuxedo, doing a James Bond screen test. He's debonair, commanding. In control, James Bond personified. And then, he forgets his lines. Tell me, when it's just you, all alone, how do you live with yourself? Do you even know who you are? Line? Cut! Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Helen. It's all good, it's all good, it's just, we're on a bit of a schedule. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, quick reset back to once I've made it this time. How are you blowing this audition? I know the speech. I know it. My God. You up every time at the exact same moment. What is this, a prank show? You're wearing a hidden camera. That's funny. No, I, um, I just have a very particular process. I've got my head around it now. I'm ready. Sorry, guys, we just, we have to-- Yeah, well, just a minute, sorry, how was your weekend? It was good, thanks, how was yours? Great. Yeah, what did you do? Just, yeah, thanks, thanks, Jim. It's my second, but, stop it. Sorry. You know what, they didn't want to see you, I had to convince them, so this is on me. I've got a confession to make, I'm light-headed from fasting, it's the holy Muslim month, it's called Ramadan. Oh. Yeah. It involves no eating and drinking, in the day, I'm light-headed from, if I can have a bit of a cultural understanding. Well, I've just seen you drink apple juice six takes in a row. I tried. It's just a shame you didn't. The moment is the beginning of a wild ride as we watch the character unravel. Ahmed has said the show is about family, ambition, and the hunger to belong, and what it costs someone when they finally get close to the thing they've been chasing their whole life. Riz Ahmed is already an Emmy Award winner for his work in The Night Of, an HBO crime drama in which he plays a college student whose life shatters after being accused of murder in New York City. In Sound of Metal, he played a punk drummer grappling with sudden hearing loss, and he was nominated for an Oscar for that film. And for The Long Goodbye, which is about a British Pakistani family whose ordinary Sunday is shattered by a far-right militia, he won the Oscar for Best Short Film. Riz Ahmed, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me back. Well, after that failed screen test that we just heard in that clip, your character, Shah, goes to the dressing room, and then he goes over the monologue he forgot during the audition, and then he starts berating himself in the mirror for failing that test. I actually want to play that, and then I want to ask you something on the other side of it. Let's listen. Riz Ahmed: Okay. You knew it? You knew it? What's wrong with you? Do you know who you are? I'll tell you who you are. You're a failure. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are ashamed of yourself, because you're ashamed of your family. Nobody, you're nothing. Riz Ahmed: Um. Come in. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Riz Ahmed: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I forgot to grab your mic. Oh, that is so agonizing. A crew member comes and says they probably heard the whole thing. You know, I mean, I love that scene, Riz, because that internal chaos, you know, it can become a whole thing. It's never just an audition when you're a brown actor, is it? Yeah, I mean, so much of the show is taken from my own experience, you know. I'm that guy who you were mentioning the night of. I remember waking up in the middle of the night two years after I rapped on the night of and going to the mirror and redoing scenes that the whole world had already seen. I'd already been handed awards for this performance. I'm like, no, I've got to get it right. And the inner critic is such a kind of big part of this show. And, you know, honestly, like, yes, the show is drawn from those experiences, but it's not about being an actor. It's about, as you said, being caught up in a chase sequence where you're chasing acceptance and running away from your own inner critic. And so we felt early on in the show you needed to see just how mean Shah's inner voice can be about him. And I just wanted to be kind of, like, vulnerable and open about that. I mean, I've definitely, you know, I've done exactly that. Like I said, going to the mirror, redoing the scenes, saying you're useless, you're crap, you don't know what you're doing. And I feel like that's something that is very, very relatable outside of auditioning or being an actor or anything like that. We're often our own worst critics. Yes, you know, I know a lot of people will be watching this series and thinking, is Riz playing himself, playing a character? And so much of this you, well, all of it you wrote. So it comes from real experience as well as your imagination. But what did Bond in particular represent to you as a British-Pakistani kid growing up in London? Yeah, well, I want to deal with the first part of what you said first, which is is Riz playing a character, playing himself? And if you don't mind, I want to say something that you said to me just before we started recording the interview. I said, look, how did you like the show? And you said, I feel like I am Shah. You said that, Tanya. You said, I feel like, damn, I'm that person. If you don't mind me saying, so many people have been saying that. And yes, there's a lot of me and Shah, but I think actually there's a lot of Shah in all of us, more than we like to admit. And really, the show is about this feeling that life sometimes feels like one big audition. We all feel like we have to perform this version of ourselves that knows the script, that, as you said, is commanding and decisive and desirable, the best public version of ourselves. We're performing that. But actually, the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge. And that's true whether you're talking about, how your life is actually going versus the Instagram post you just got up, put up, or that you saw of someone else, or like how professional and put together you're seeming on a Zoom call when actually you're not wearing any pants, you know, just out of the frame. And so there's this, just to answer your question, like, I feel like I'm playing, I'm trying to draw on a feeling that is personal to me, but I think it's personal to a lot of people. And then that extra component, though, of playing the man, James Bond. Like, he is considered the ultimate, you know, in every way. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the show isn't really about James Bond, but James Bond is a very important symbol because he is the ultimate symbol of success. Yes, sure. As an actor, he is, you know, the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. And yet it's also just, you know, for any of us, he's this archetype of like, like I said, decisiveness, of being in control, of being unflappable, of being invulnerable. And so I wanted the character of James Bond to serve as this symbol of aspiration, this unattainable kind of self that Shah is hunting down almost. And in chasing this symbol, is he abandoning himself? Is he abandoning where he's from? Is he abandoning his family? Has he forgotten actually who he really is? And so the show is trying to, to deal with that. And I think that that's something that, you know, we all kind of go through where we're often pulled between the people we were and the people we want to be. And actually the healthy equilibrium is probably somewhere in the middle, you know, probably that thing you want to be is like an attempt to escape yourself. And that thing you were is maybe, you know, a version of yourself you need to evolve out of. But we often feel pulled between those two polarities. How long did it take for you to work on this concept, this idea and come to what is a genre bending series? Oh, man, I started kind of scrimmaling down ideas for this show in 2014. And I started doing that because, as I said, the gap between my public and private self started becoming so big and so stressful, they actually started feeling kind of hilarious. I'll give you an example. Oh, really? Yeah. Like the week that it got revealed that, you know, OK, I'm in the new Star Wars and they released it. They released a cast photograph of us all on set. That same week, I got banned from my local. supermarket for suspected shoplifting um because my washing machine had broken only clean clothes i had were flip-flops bright pink swim shorts a bright green puffer jacket and a tank top i'm dragging a massive bag of dirty clothes around to the laundromat i remember it's my brother's birthday i haven't got him a cake i go to tesco's i'm trying to get him a cake they got no cake i buy a frozen pizza with birthday candles i'm a checkout it seems like an insane thing i'm buying anyway it's like yeah birthday candles and pizza i'm dressed insanely i've got this massive laundry bag and i forgot to beep it properly on the checkout and another pizza and it goes off and security like yeah this you look this person looked kind of shady and we get into a back and forth and i'm so frustrated at one point i go dude i'm not shoplifting i'm star wars man and they go okay this person is definitely crazy and uh you're banned you're never coming back here it's just an example about like the messy chaos of who we really are versus the image of success that's somewhere out there publicly and again that's not just true for an actor that's true of everyone who's posting their best selfie on instagram you know um so i started jotting down these little stories to try and just process them and make sense of them i knew there was something in these contradictions and juxtapositions that was about me making sense of my own experience um but also that just felt kind of universal if i could just get a handle on it and so i spent many years jotting down these um these ideas um and then it was when i met my co-showrunner ben carlin we put the writer's room together and all this kind of stuff we realized actually the perfect symbol um for this show is is james bond and that was partly also because my name had been mentioned in relation to james bond casting in some articles and and stuff over the years so in the meta kind of spirit of this show we're trying to be as meta as possible and um and have fun with that i thought actually that's the perfect symbol you know it's a perfect symbol of for a character who wants to be anything other than himself who would he want to be he'd want to be james bond there are so many good one-liners in this show um that have to come from real life and so hearing that story about you inside of the convenience store and saying i'm star wars there's actually a scene with your ex-girlfriend who uh she's a writer she's a columnist she puts the scathing piece out about shah and in one scene she says like point blank someone is talking to the two of you and she says something like he wants to play a white character to which shy your character pushes back with he's not white if he's me to which she responds he wouldn't be white you would be and oof you know what what are what were you doing in that exchange with that exchange yeah well you know we don't really want to come up with any answers i have nothing to say to you you know uh i really want to kind of like explore the different sides of the representation conversation in that moment really you know um i think it's an important conversation i also think it has its limits i also think it's been weaponized and turned into an economy in some ways and a competitive race you know representation merchantry and and i think it also can sometimes be a distraction from real systemic change you know the tokenism of window dressing can hide like bigger bigger things you know and i think it's an important conversation and i think it's an issue um the lie beneath sometimes so i think there's an interesting kind of back and forth that they have there um there's really kind of getting into some of that nitty-gritty but again without answers just trying to kind of put it all out there but i think what's really interesting actually is what's underneath that conversation is a personal relationship about um you know that they uh this is a conversation between my character shah and his ex yasmin played by the amazing ritu aria from umbrella academy and polite society and really what's going on there underneath the kind of socio-political think piece jousting is two ex lovers who are trying to jab at each other and push and pull and look for validation and get one up on each other because they're hurt because they both feel like the other has left them behind in some way and what was really important to me more than anything is that i think it's a show didn't exist in a conceptual space it's about characters it's about relationships you know everyone has the one that got away and i was like well what if shah and the one that got away have their whole entire episode together yeah it sort of flips the series for one episode to be kind of a romantic comedy yeah we try and flip the series the whole time and you know there's a spy thriller episode there's romantic comedy there's a kind of surreal episode there's one that's almost like the bond gala you know like well james bond turns up at the other kind of you know black tie event and hijinks ensues you know we've got that we've got all these different flavors and we've got an eid episode as well you know i felt like we've got christmas episodes thanksgiving episodes i want to have an eid episode um and so we very deliberately trying to layer in and thread multiple different genres because honestly i feel like my life takes place in different genres i feel like right now i'm here you know lucky me you know pretending to be all clever talking and talking to you guys on fresh air and i'm gonna walk outside and slip on a banana peel and like fall flat on my face and suddenly i'm in a slapstick you know um and it's like i we wanted to have that multiplicity that tonal whiplash um because honestly that's just what i enjoy and i felt like if i can make something it's a full meal that is a romance and a spy thriller and a family drama and but overall a comedy then i could also just solve a very personal problem which is me and my wife squabbling over what we're going to watch uh you know let's let's get in there and try and do it all i marvel at the the multi-nature of this series as i'm watching it i'm just thinking how did he uh pitch this you know how does one pitch something like this and get it green lit because it's so well done but it also can't really be explained in one line you know oh thank you that that means the world to me you know it's it's interesting you say it can't be explained in one line because throughout the whole process we struggled with that right and then when we got to the very end of the process we actually found a way of summing up the whole show in one word and and that word is bait and yes and what does that mean i want to unpack it for a minute right so bait is a british slang word which means being blatant and in your face and attention seeking there we go that's what my character is doing for much of the series bait is um an online term or provoking people online that's a big part of our show as well that element bait in urdu means your loyalty or your allegiance and that is something that sha is contending with it's home versus ambition east versus west bait in arabic and hebrew means home and so much of this show is a love letter to home and it's about family and how far do you travel from home in order to please home or help home you know um and then of course there's a big spy thriller element to our show and bait is something that's used as part of a trap and so it's that so it's a weird thing where only in retrospect we realize like oh my god we accidentally stumbled on the perfect title for this that actually communicates the entire layer cake of this show it is all those flavors and the word bait means all those things that's remarkable that you stumbled upon like knowing those meanings outside of the traditional meaning of bait that wasn't when you all said oh with bait did you have all of those before you no no do you know where um i had i often have to explain what the word bait means to american collaborators because i say it all the time often i'll come up with an idea you know we're spitballing in the writer's room and i'll go what about this no actually that's too bait that's a bit bait man i don't want to be as bait as that and they go what do you mean and i was like oh bait means like too blatant it's not subtle enough and of course that's british slang because the most important thing you have to be as a brit is understated and subtle and you know reserved and so bait means like too blatant it's not subtle is a kind of derogatory kind of slang term sir patrick stewart best known as captain picard in star trek he appears in bait in a role that i will not spoil except to say that it's not what you'd expect um and i wonder what does his presence do in the story that no one else could first of all it elevates the story just by the fact that it's patrick stewart in this story i mean he's such a hero um you know i don't want to i don't want to say too much about the role he played but i because it is very particular and i don't want to give anything away um i guess i'll just say that working with him showed me that your your art can kind of only be as big as your heart is you know if that doesn't sound too corny like he you kind of have to have a capacity for such receptivity humility generosity um and empathy in order to kind of be an artist of that stature and at that level you know just the human yeah just just the kindness the openness at 84 to step into this story i remember having to explain you know various kinds of british slang and urdu swear words to him you know it's nothing but just always engaged always interested always shall we do it again um yeah he was he was just such a pro and such a um i i'll really cherish that experience our guest today is award-winning actor riz ahmed We'll be back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is award-winning actor, writer, producer, and rapper Riz Ahmed. He received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his starring role as Shah Latif in the prime video satirical drama series Bait. Riz Ahmed has built a distinctive career in film and television. From a rebellious intelligence officer in Rogue One, a Star Wars story, a young Pakistani-American on trial for murder in HBO's The Night Of, a performance that made him the first Muslim and South Asian man to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor. In 2019, Ahmed starred as Ruben, a punk metal drummer losing his hearing and sound of metal, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. And earlier this year, he starred in a film adaptation. of Shakespeare's Hamlet. He got his start on pirate radio as a teenager in London, competing in rap battles and recording politically charged music that got banned on British airwaves. In 2020, he released The Long Goodbye, a concept album, which uses an abusive romantic relationship as a metaphor for the relationship between the UK and its immigrants. The short film, based on the album, earned the Academy Award for Best Live Action, and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Film. The film is set to be released in September 2020. Riz, let's talk a little bit about Shakespeare, because it wasn't really your thing as a kid until a teacher I hear introduced you to Hamlet. What do you remember about that first encounter with the play, and what did it kind of unlock for you? Yeah, it's really interesting. I, like many people, felt like Shakespeare is the epitome of everything I'm on the outside of. It doesn't belong to me. It's stuffy. It's elitist. And I got a government-assisted place to a private school where I felt like an outsider for many different reasons. And I was lucky enough to have an English teacher called Mr. Roseblade, who was a white, Jewish, middle-aged man from a different place in the UK. I thought we had nothing in common, but he spoke fluent Punjabi. And he brought me Hamlet and said, you know, this thing, this story, this character, it's at the heart of the establishment that you feel so alienated from. In many ways. But have a read of it. You might recognize yourself in this character, and I did. Like, millions of people have, right? Hamlet being a character who feels out of place. Hamlet himself feels like an outsider. He feels like he doesn't belong, like no one understands. And it really spoke to me as a teenager. But more than that, what I realized was, hang on a minute, this Hamlet story set in medieval Denmark actually is exactly like growing up in Wembley. This is about who you can and can't marry. This is about everyone squabbling over the family business. This is about the reality and lived experience of spirituality, ghosts, and spirit possession, which is par for the course. It's, you know, it's part of our lived experience culturally. And this is also actually kind of pivots on a story point of marrying one's sister-in-law if your brother dies, which is a cultural tradition. I think it's actually a Jewish tradition and an ancient Hindu and South Asian tradition. I've actually grown up with people who've had to do that. If their brother has died tragically, they themselves are unmarried. With the consent, obviously, of their sister-in-law and the conversation that they have, they go, shall we get married? It's a way of protecting the orphans and protecting the widow. So this didn't feel like this antiquated kind of slightly out of touch piece to me. I was like, if you put it in my community, I don't know what I'm going to do. I was like, if you put it in my community, in my experience, this is right now. This is completely vivid and completely urgent. And it was then at the age of 17 that I very precociously had the idea that, man, I want to make a movie of this one day. And I want to set it in that place. And in doing so, I hope to kind of render this story more vividly in a more urgent, modern way than maybe I've seen it. And just make it feel real. Because all those things, all those things are so real in that environment. What did you have to kind of work through to get to this adaptation? Because you could have just played Hamlet and put on a movie adaptation of Hamlet as it is. You know, I really believe that the amount of time it took was kind of quite divinely guided in a way. And that's because I feel that this is the moment for this story. You know, it's a story. Hamlet is a story and it's a character who is grieving the illusion that the world was ever a fair place. And I think that's how we're all feeling now. We're all grieving and reeling from this realization. Okay, I knew the world was unfair, but now the shameless, brazen unfairness of it is just kind of laid bare. And it's about grieving that illusion. And it's also about feeling powerless in the face of how unfair it is. And it's actually feeling kind of complicit in it and gaslit. And that's what the play is about. And I think that this is when it was meant to be told. But for us creatively, the part that we were struggling to unlock is how do you not make this feel just like a Shakespeare performance and a poetry recital? How do you not make this feel like a kind of self-congratulatory, like actor wants to take on the classic? And actually, that was the opposite of how we wanted it to feel. And it really took us meeting Anil Kharia, the director. It was after I collaborated with him on the short film, The Long Goodbye, for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, oh, I think we know how to do this. We need a director who's worked a lot in rap music videos. We need a director who has actually, can render poetry in a very raw way and give us raw action in a very poetic way. And that's what he did in that short film. And that's what he does in his films. And we connected and we had a long conversation about how the short film is a short film. And I think that's what he did in that short film. And this has to feel like music, you know? There's the classic line from Hamlet, to be or not to be, that is the question. And in your version, Hamlet delivers this famous, basically speeding through the rain at 100 miles an hour. And I want to play a little bit of it. Let's listen. To be or not to be, that is the question. Let's listen. That is my guest, Riz Ahmed, in his latest film adaptation of Hamlet. And Riz, you've talked about this, but for most of us, we're kind of taught that this speech is about suicide. Basically, Hamlet is weighing whether life is worth living. And you came to believe something entirely different is happening in those lines. What do you think Hamlet is actually asking? Yeah, I don't think it's about suicide at all. It's about fighting back against oppression, even if you know that you will lose everything, possibly even your life. It's actually, it's very clear, it's very clear in black and white in the text, the active verb here is about taking, it's about to take up arms. You know, what he's saying is there's two choices. You can carry on being, and it's very interesting. He says, be, not living, just be. You can exist and you can exist and just suffer all the oppression and all the unfairness and all the injustice of the world and all the insults that life throws at you. Or you can fight, but fighting back might mean you will no longer be. So it's really about whether we are willing to pay the price of true resistance, you know. And it's actually a very, very radical speech. It's very confronting. It's tackling a taboo subject, really. You know, the idea of taking up arms and resisting oppression and the powers that be, it's dangerous. It's a dangerous idea, actually. It can get you arrested if you discuss that openly to this day. You and your director, Anil Kharia, you all became new fathers while making this film or were new fathers while making this film. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah, yeah. And that ended up being a big part of the process, actually. Yeah, how so? How did becoming a father kind of change what you thought this play was actually about or the process itself? Well, I guess, struck me that this is a play in part about fatherhood and about the absence father and um i didn't fully understand that um until i self until i myself became a father um you know until i became actually an absent father in the sense that i was away for much of the day you know awake before my kid was awake home after my kid gone to sleep and i started to understand that um emotionally but actually it was more the effect it had on me um physically because you know i'm waiting to i want to play this role it means so much to me this story like 15 years of developing the script i want to getting ready for these soliloquies and what would happen is me and anil would turn up on set um on like two hours sleep one hour sleep like 45 minutes sleep because your baby was a newborn yeah and the baby was a newborn exactly and his child was sleep regressing and what i realized after the first i was just like well this is all just going to be a total failure now and then i realized that hang on a minute this is exactly how hamlet feels this the word that is repeated most frequently in to be or not to be is the word sleep this guy is not sleeping he needs to sleep he hasn't slept he's unraveling from that as well and it actually infused a kind of very um raw kind of quite vulnerable quite uh uh frazzled uh kind of texture i think to to the to my performance that i could never have planned or controlled um you know i think you can kind of feel a lot of that exhausted uh kind of disarray in the performance and and honestly the version of hamlet i'm interested in is not the version who is the smartest guy in the room spouting commanding poetry the version of hamlet i'm interested in is the most stressed vulnerable and under pressure guy in the room who continues to speak because the words are failing him he can't find the right words i mean shakespeare was a wordsmith he's working in verse and rhythm and i'm thinking about your background in rap and um your politically charged album and i'm wondering did that hip-hop instinct shape at all how you heard and delivered these lines yeah very very much so very much so um here's my take on it a lot of people find a block with shakespeare because they find it difficult to understand what the words mean i i totally get it i often feel the same way here's the thing people in shakespeare's day themselves did not speak like that they didn't say that shakespeare made up like between three and five thousand new words i think there's some estimates the word eyeball is a word that he made up imagine hearing that for the first time a what ball an eye what he made that up and one thing that he played with all the time was rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm and so in the same way that when i listen to some of my favorite rappers new songs i don't know what they say the first time around but i am totally wrapped i'm totally leaning in i'm engaged i feel it emotionally it's the same way your first experience of this thing is supposed to be like music you didn't catch all of the words but that word there felt weird enough to make you sit up and what you're supposed to do is receive uh an electric charge of rhythm and melody and musicality just like rap music but that's not the actual experience of these plays so i wish people um more people spoke about shakespeare in that way um because to me it is much more like music than it is like you know an english class did you come to this understanding as that 17 year old whose teacher introduced you did you see that connection because you were kind of deep in rap at that moment that time um yeah it's a it's such a such an interesting connection to make you know i i think it's uh an inevitable one to make really you know if you're interested in poetry if you're interested in lyricism if you're interested in rhythm like shakespeare's doing that he's playing in in all those arenas and so it was clear to me very early on but something it isn't also lost on me is at the same time i was studying under rob claire and doing a master's in classical acting which is essentially just at masters and just in shakespeare performance that's when i started on the rap battle circuit in london and things like jump off from battle scars and bombay bronx and you know competing in all these championships and and so it did somehow in my mind feel like it's it's one thing if you're just joining us my guest is actor writer musician and producer riz ahmed more after a break this is fresh air this is fresh air and today we're listening back to my interview with emmy and oscar winner riz ahmed he stars in the prime video series bait for the role he received an emmy nomination for best lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie his most recent film was a modern adaptation of shakespeare's hamlet which was released earlier this year as you've mentioned riz you grew up in wembley in northwest london the son of pakistani parents who immigrated in the 1970s take me back to when you were a teenage riz and you were djing and rapping you started on pirate radio how did you discover pirate radio um so i grew up in the you know in the mid 90s in the uk i grew up in wembley wembley is both you know the site of england's greatest triumph in the 19 1966 world cup and also you know in the shadow of those um of that stadium i'd go every sunday to wembley market which is where you'd buy you know buy the chinese spring roll and the immigrant kind of food stalls and the fake designer clothes that we'd buy and sell over there um you know from with amongst that kind of working class and immigrant community and pirate radio station culture was just that that was just everywhere you know um yes you'd have you know the bbc radio stations and the other london stations but in between all those airwaves the one that's all the fm frequencies that were not spoken for you'd hear faint crackle and then the voice of mcs or microphones that were broadcasting from the roofs of the housing projects locally and that that's pirate radio culture so it was there that i was kind of exposed more and more to drum and bass and garage particularly when i was too young to actually go to the raves themselves as soon as old as i was old enough to kind of try and hack off um whatever faint facial hair i had and try and like throw it back thicker i you know i was at the raves themselves and and um you know i just love the music i love the specificity of london's musical subculture and the uk i think does that so well you know because of the the clash and uh um the mix of different of different cultures and different sounds and influences so um so yeah i was exposed to it and then i started doing it myself um both at raves and and on pirate radio uh and i remember when i went to oxford and i got in there i felt like i'd lost something i'd lost this thing that i loved and so i was eager to kind of keep it going and that's when i started you know promoting my own club nights and it became a really invaluable place where every week without fail i could hone my craft i could try out new lyrics i could gain confidence as a performer and i think it helped me not just as an mc but as an actor how how old were you when you recorded the song post 9 11 blues so post 9 11 blues my first rap track it's kind of deliberately silly but also deliberately um you know it's a satire really it's a provocative kind of satire and it takes the shape of an almost like a nursery rhyme or school kids jingle um i wrote that when i was 23 i think 22 um you know i just felt like i was surrounded by this circus of fear-mongering and um of paranoia and mistrust and the war on terror and being a young muslim post 9 11 i was like this is crazy like how do i make sense of this and comedy is really my first love you know so i decided to kind of write this satirical rap um it got banned from the british airwaves it did kind of like um unofficially there was a sense amongst radio djs that they cannot play it because it's too politically sensitive and um what was your response to that and did it kind of feel a little powerful i mean that i mean that meant your words had power let me tell you the best thing you can do to an artist who's trying to start out and get some attention with their work is ban their work um this is in the era of myspace that the song very quickly went very viral and it gave me a little confidence and excitement about how maybe i can if i say the thing that i feel but that no one else is maybe saying that that is i can really travel you know my guest is actor writer and producer riz ahmed more of our conversation after a break this is fresh air this is fresh air and today we're listening back to my interview with emmy and oscar winner riz ahmed he's been nominated for an emmy for his work on the limited series bait let's talk a little bit about the long goodbye it was your first studio album released in 2020 there's a song called the breakup which is the first track on the album which you uses an abusive romantic relationship as a kind of extended metaphor for the relationship between the UK and immigrants. And let's listen to a little bit of it. Britain's broken up with me. We had our ups, but now it's broken down. Let me break down the whole. I was a mogul. Had the bling and the girls, grit and the pearls. My cash was a quarter of the stash in the world. And this stray pale chick came to trade. I laid with her, came to pay. She straight slithered and then stayed. I couldn't kick her out. She saw I was at war with myself and I'm a fool. When you're at war with yourself, you're easy to divide and rule. She had me locked down. Beat me red and blue. Till I knew that right was white and not brown. When I make you hate yourself, you hand over your crown. She moved in. I was a guest unwanted in my own house. She stole my ****, broke my ****, starved me, scarred me, got paid off the same back she whipped. Left me hungry. Took my industry and independence from me. Took my dough, then lent me money. Said that it was all to help me. And she had beef with some German next man. I went to war for her twice. Almost lost my left hand. That was the breakup from my guest today, Riz Ahmed. And there is also a short film for The Long Goodbye, which kind of serves as a music video. It won an Oscar for Best Short Live Action Film. Tell me about the decision to use language of love to talk about belonging and exile and loss. I feel that. The poetic metaphor of love and relationship and longing is something that I grew up around in the tradition of Urdu poetry. And then reading it and studying it a little bit more as an adult. You know, a lot of Sufi poetry, if you look at Rumi, or if you look at Ghalib, or if you look at, you know, Ghazal writing from South Asia, the Middle East, from Iran, is often love poetry. And love is used as a metaphor in the relationship between love and exile. And love is used as a metaphor in the relationship between love and exile and loss. Thank you.