Whether people are rooting for me because I’m Muslim or from Wembley…it’s beautiful, says Riz Ahmed
WHEN the Oscars ceremony takes place at the end of this month, Riz Ahmed will be the first Muslim ever to be within touching distance of the lead actor statuette.
But it has not all been smooth sailing for the British actor, who has had to face down racism at many turns in his life.
The 38-year-old Londoner had a knife held to his throat by a skinhead, is repeatedly searched by airport security teams, faced offensive rhymes in his other career as a rapper and kept getting offered roles as a terrorist.
What has helped the Rogue One and Venom star get to the top is a determination not to be stereotyped, coupled with a “workaholic” nature.
Riz spent seven months training for his Oscar-nominated performance in Sound Of Metal — which won two Baftas yesterday — in which he plays drug-addicted rock drummer Ruben Stone, who loses his hearing.
Many actors turned down the role because its director, Darius Marder, insisted they had to learn sign language as well as how to play the drums properly.
Riz, who grew up in Wembley, North London, was totally committed to the role and said: “I spent seven months learning drums, learning sign language, being immersed in these communities. I’m a workaholic. I really love structure. I could be a bit of a control freak.
“Some people really connect with the idea that I was the first Muslim nominated for lead actor. That’s beautiful and I support that.
“If some people are overjoyed to see it’s a film that focuses on deaf representation, then that’s beautiful.
“If for some people they’re rooting for the fact that it’s someone from Wembley, then that’s cool.”
Riz’s parents came to Britain from Pakistan in the 1970s and his father, a shipping broker, had big ambitions for Riz as well as his older brother and sister.
Thanks to outstanding academic results, Riz secured a scholarship to the independent Merchant Taylors’ school in North West London, whose former pupils include comedian Michael McIntyre.
He quickly realised growing up that the streets of the capital could be a very scary place. He once wrote: “As children in the 1980s my brother and I were stopped near our home by a skinhead who decided to put a knife to my brother’s throat.
“A decade later, the knife to my throat was held by another ‘P***’, a label we wore with swagger in the Brit-Asian youth and gang culture of the 1990s.
“I grew up dancing between different worlds a lot. Wembley went through a lot of transitions in the time I lived there.
“It went from being quite a lower-middle-class, white area to recently becoming an Asian immigrant area.
“When I was a little kid, I remember we suffered a lot of racism as well.”
Away from the stark reality of the streets, Riz started to make home movies in his head.
‘I’D ACT OUT FILMS, RUNNING AROUND THE HOUSE’
He said: “Every film I’d act out was an 18. I didn’t even record any of them, I’d just be running around the house, you know, acting out these stories.”
But Riz was unsure whether he could become an actor, given that his dad was hoping he would embark on a secure career, like his brother, a psychiatrist, and his sister, a lawyer.
He said: “As a child of immigrants, I think we were encouraged to look at kind of stable professions.”
He secured a place at Oxford University but felt so out of place as one of the few non-white students that at one point he quit his philosophy, politics and economics course.
, All Rights Reserved.But he settled back in, and aside from his studies he even started his own drum and bass nights, which were regularly attended by his fellow student Felicity Jones — and he would later go on to be her co-star in the Star Wars spin-off Rogue One.
It was at university that Riz’s acting talents were spotted and a theatre producer helped him get into drama school.
At the same time he was pursuing a dream of becoming a rapper, taking part in MC battles.
In a recent podcast with Louis Theroux, Riz told how in 2005 he got booed off stage because the crowd mistakenly thought he had made a racist slur against a black rival.
He said: “I got up there, the only South Asian kid, I got a lot of racist digs, they’d say, ‘corner shop’, ‘kebab’, ‘smelly’, all that.
“I was up against this black rapper. I said, ‘You’re so ignorant, calling me an immigrant, you obviously haven’t seen your own skin pigment’. I was trying to say, ‘You’re an immigrant like me’, but it didn’t land as I intended.”
The scene is recreated in Riz’s 2020 movie Mogul Mowgli, which he co-wrote and was inspired by his attempts to make it as a musician. Riz has released two solo albums and another as the Swet Shop Boys, with American rapper Heems.
But acting is where he has had the most notable success, starring in movies such as The Road To Guantanamo, Four Lions, Nightcrawler and Jason Bourne.
Making films has taken him around the globe, putting him at the mercy of airport security teams who have profiled him on the basis of his skin colour.
At Luton Airport he was “pinned to the wall” by officers who believed he might be a terrorist.
Riz, who had been attending a film festival, wrote about the experience, saying: “Returning to Luton Airport after our festival win, British intelligence officers frogmarched me to a room where they insulted, threatened and then attacked me.
“‘What kind of film you making? Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?’ an officer screamed, twisting my arm to the point of snapping.”
Despite the negative experiences, Riz’s acting career has gone from strength to strength. In 2017 he became the first Asian man to win an acting Emmy, for his outstanding performances in the US TV series The Night Of.
Winning the Oscar would complete a rollercoaster year for Riz. During the pandemic he got married in a socially distanced ceremony but also lost an aunt and an uncle in Covid’s first wave.
He said: “You don’t think it will necessarily affect your family directly and then all of a sudden it does. It’s very strange.”
He had met his future wife, Californian author Fatima Farheen Mirza, while studying for the role of Ruben in Sound Of Metal in 2018, when they found themselves sharing a plug socket in a New York cafe.
Despite the Covid restrictions on weddings, they decided to get married last year and Riz joked that not being allowed to have many guests meant “you didn’t have 500 aunties hanging around you, pinching your cheeks”.
The night before filming started for Sound Of Metal, Riz was so hyped up that he says he couldn’t sleep — and with work due to begin he suddenly realised he kept inadvertently making an odd facial expression while drumming.
He said: “I actually discovered the day before we shot the scene that I was doing a weird thing with my face when I was playing drums.
“I was like, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me?’ ” His colleagues thought it was deliberate, but Riz replied: “That’s not an acting choice, dude. That’s my face being crazy.”
‘DEAF ACTORS TAUGHT ME WHAT TRUE LISTENING IS’
He adds that he learned a lot from playing a hearing-impaired person. He spent two hours a day for seven months learning American sign language in preparation for the film, and to try to recreate the disorientating experience of being unable to hear he used sound-deadening ear blockers and listened to electronic white noise, like static on a radio.
He said: “I think the deaf community taught me, and these deaf actors taught me what true listening is. It’s this thing with your whole body.”
Riz lives in San Francisco because Fatima’s family are nearby. But he is keen to get back to his pad in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, and said: “Britain is my home, it’s a place I love.”
With the major accolades heading his way, he is finally accepting he is an actor.
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He said: “For a long time I had trouble describing myself as an actor, an artist. I thought, ‘Listen, I’m trying this out and hopefully it works out. But tomorrow it might not and next year it might not’.
“For me, it’s now that I’m more at peace with, like, I think maybe today’s the day where I’m saying, ‘I want to be an actor’, you know?”
- Sound Of Metal streams on Amazon Prime on April 12 and will be in cinemas from May 17.