Riz Ahmed is chasing acceptance in 'Bait'

A struggling British Pakistani actor lands the audition of a lifetime as James Bond.

Work 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 he's not chasing a villain. He's chasing acceptance. That's the setup for bait, a new prime video series that is part spy thriller,

part family comedy, part psychological unraveling, and entirely unlike anything else on television right now. My guest, Riz Ahmed, wrote, created it, produced it, and stars as the lead character Shalatif. bait opens with Shah and a Tuxedo, doing a James Bond screen test. He's debinair, commanding, and 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? - Hi. - Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry, help. - It's all good. It's all good. - It's just around a bit of a schedule.

“- Yeah. - That's why I was thinking a quick reset back to what's on there this time.”

- How are you blowing this audition? - I know this speech. - I know it. - Yeah, you f***ing out every time at the exact same moment. - What is this a prank show? - It's funny. - It's funny. - It's just a very particular process. - I've got my head around it now. - I've got my head around it now.

Sorry, I was meant to say we have to... - Yeah, well, just a minute. Sorry. How was your weekend? - That's good thanks, I was just... - Great. - What did you do? - Just that thing, thanks. - Thanks, Jim. - That's nice. - It's nice, but stop it.

- Sorry. - In and more. I 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 lightheaded from fasting.

It's the holy, mostly in month. It's called Ramadan. It's involves no eating and drinking more in the day.

“Why am I in it for a bit of a culture understanding?”

- Well, I've just seen you drink apple juice. - Six takes in her. - I tried. It's just a shame, it didn't. No. This moment is the beginning of a wild ride

as we watch this character unravel. And Riz has said, embedded in this show is a hunger to belong. And what it costs someone,

when they finally get close to the thing that they've been chasing their whole lives,

Riz is an Emmy award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor who is known for many roles, including the night of an HBO crime drama and which he plays a college student whose life shatters after being accused of murder. And sound of metal, he played a punk drummer grappling with Sutton hearing loss. And in the long goodbye, he's part of a British Pakistani family

whose ordinary Sunday is shattered by a far right militia. Riz Ahmed earned an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. This spring, his adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet opens in theaters. And Riz, welcome back to fresh air. - Thank you so much for having me back.

- Well, after that filled 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. - Come in. I forgot to grab your mic. - Oh, that is so agonized. A crew member comes and 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, as so much of the show is taken from my own experience. You know, I'm that guy who you were mentioning 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 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 shows 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, go into the mirror, are you doing the scenes saying you're useless. You're crap, you 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. It's, we're often our own worst critics.

Yes, you know, I know a lot of people will be watching this series and thinking is risk 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 do the first part of what you said first,

which is, is risk playing a character playing himself. And if you don't mind, I want to say something that you said to me just before we start recording the interview. I said, look, how did you like the show? And you said, I feel like I'm sharp.

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 sharp. I think actually there's a lot of shine, 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.

You know, 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.

“You know, and that's true, whether you're talking about how your life is actually going versus the Instagram post,”

you just got to put up, whether you saw of someone else, or like how professional and put together your 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 onto your question, like, I feel like I'm playing. I'm trying to draw in a feeling that it's 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 yeah, it's also just, you know, for any of us, he's this archetype of, like, like I said, decisiveness, desirability, being in control, being unflappable, being in vulnerable.

And so I wanted the character of James Bond to serve as this symbol of aspiration, this unattainable kind of self, that chart 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 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 squimming down ideas for this show in 2014. And I started doing that because they said that gap between my public and private self started becoming so big. And so stressful, they actually started feeling kind of hilarious.

What give you an example? Oh, really? Yeah, like the week that it got revealed that, you know, Kevin, new Star Wars, and they released it, released a cast photograph of us all on set. That's the same week I got banned from my local supermarket for suspected shoplifting.

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.”

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, but the candles and pizza, I'm dressed insanely, I've got this massive laundry bag. And I forgot to be a bit properly on the checkout and other 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 sold for a straight at a one point, I go, dude, I'm not shoplifting, I'm Star Wars man.

And they got, okay, this person's definitely crazy, and you're banned, you never come in back here.

This is 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. So I started jotting down these little stories to try and just process them and make sense. They're like, you know, something in these contradictions and juxtaposition is that, was about me making sense of my own experience. 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 ideas.

And then it was when I met my co-showrunner Ben Carley and we put the writers room together and all this kind of stuff we realized actually the perfect symbol for this show is James Bond. And that was part of yours because my name had been mentioned in relation to James Bond casting in some articles and stuff over the years. So in the meta kind of spirit of this show, what we're trying to be as meta as possible and and have fun with that. Actually, that's a perfect symbol, you know, that's a perfect symbol of for a character who wants to be anything other than himself, who do you want to be, he'd want to be James Bond.

There are so many good one liners in this show 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 she's a writer. She's a columnist. She puts the skating 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 Shah 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, "Oh, you know, what are 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 none. You know, I really want to kind of like explore the different sides of the representation conversation in that moment, really.

“You know, 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, merchant tree. 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 issues. I think it's an interesting kind of back and forth that they have there. 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, you know,

that this is a conversation between my character, Shah and his ex Yasmin played by the amazing Ritu area from umbrella academy and polite society.

I'm really what's going on there underneath the kind of sociopolitical 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 this 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 to flip the series the whole time and, you know, there's a spy thriller episode, there's a romantic comedy, there's a kind of surreal episode. There's one that's almost like the Bond Gala, you know, like James Bond turns up at the kind of black tie event and hijinks and soos, 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.

I feel like right now I'm here, you know, lucky me, you know, pretending to be all clever, talking to you guys on fresh air and I'm going to walk outside and slip on a banana peel

“and like full flower my face and suddenly I'm in a slapstick, you know, and it's like, we wanted to have that multiplicity, that tonal bitplash, because honestly, that's just what I enjoy.”

And I felt like if I can make something that'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 scrambling over what we're going to watch. You know, let's get in there and try and do it all. I marvel at the multi nature of this series as I'm watching it, I'm just thinking, how did he pitch this? How does one pitch something like this and get it green lid because it's so well done, but it also can't really be explained in one line, you know.

Oh, thank you, that means the world to me, you know, 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 that word is bait. 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 this series.”

Bait is an online term about trolling or provoking people online. That's a big part of our show as well, the element. Bait in Urdu means your loyalty or your allegiance. And that is something that shards contending with. It's home versus ambition. He's 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 arm or help home, you know? 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 yeah, let's come up with bait. Did you have all of those before you? No, you know what?

I often have to explain what the word bait means to American calibre is because I say it all the time often I've come up with an idea, you know, a spitballing the writers room and all that. What about this? No, I actually asked to bait. That's a bit bait. When I don't need to be as bait as that and they go, what do you mean? And I was like, oh, a bait means like two blatant. It's not subtle enough.

“And of course, that's British slang because the most important thing you have to be is a Brit is understated and subtle and, you know, reserved.”

And so bait is a kind of derogatory kind of slang term. Sir Patrick Stewart, best known as Captain Picard and Star Trek, he appears in bait and a role that I will not spoil, except to say that it's not what you'd expect. 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 his story.

I mean, he's such a hero. You know, I don't want to say too much about the role he plays because it is very particular and I don't want to give anything away. I guess I'll just say that working with him showed me that your art can kind of only be as big as your heart is, you know, if that doesn't sound too corny. Like you kind of have to have a capacity for such receptivity, humility, generosity and empathy in order to kind of be an artist of that stature and that level. And just the hum, yeah, just the kindness, the openness 84 to step into this story. I remember having to explain, you know, various kinds of British slang and or do swear words to him, you know, nothing but just always engaged, always interested, always show me to do it again.

Yeah, he was he's just such a pro and such a gentleman, and I'll really cherish the experience. Our guest today is award winning actor, Riz Ahmed. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tony Mosley, and this is fresh air.

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Liz, 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'm like many people felt like Shakespeare is there, pits in me everything 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 outside of for many different reasons.

I was lucky enough to have an English teacher called Mr. Rose Blade who was a white Jewish middle-aged man from a different place in the UK.

He brought me Hamlet and said, this story, this character, it's the heart of the establishment that you feel so alienated from many ways. But I 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. 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 Wimley.

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 path of the course. It's part of our lived experience culturally. This is also a kind of pivot 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 brothers died tragically, they themselves are unmarried with the consent, obviously, of their sister-in-law and of a political conversation that they have, they go, "Should 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, 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 procociously 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 and a more urgent, more than way than maybe. I've seen it. And make it just make it feel real, because 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?”

I really believe that the amount of time it took was kind of quite divinely guided in a way. That's because I feel that this is the moment for this story. 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 that, "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 gas lit about it. 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?

And it really took us meeting a Neil Carrier, the director. And it was after I collaborated with him on the short film The Long Good Buy, for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, "Oh, I think we now had to do this. We needed director who's worked a lot in rap music videos. We needed 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 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,

politically, basically speeding through the rain at 100 miles an hour. And I want to play a little bit of it. Let's listen.

The arrows of our ranges for you will take on against the sea of troubles. But by posing and the dive to sleep, no more. Or by sleep to say, "We are not taking the thousand natural shocks that fnoshes into the consummation that felt, we need to be wished to die." To sleep? To sleep, to sleep to change the dream. That is the rub.

That is my guest, Riz, Ahmed, and his latest film adaptation of Hamlet. And Riz, you've talked about this before, 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 you will lose everything, possibly even your life.

It's actually very clear in black and white in the tech, the active verb here, is about taking it, 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 back, 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, to, you know, the idea of taking up arms and resisting oppression and the powers of "Be."

It's dangerous idea, actually. You can get you arrested, you discuss that openly to this day.

“You and your director, Neil Carrey, 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 it become a father kind of change? What you thought this play was actually about or the process itself? Well, I guess it's struck me that this is a play in part about fatherhood and about the absent father and I didn't fully understand that until I self, until I myself became a father. 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 got to sleep.

And I started to understand that emotionally, but actually it was more the effect they had on me physically, because, you know, I'm waiting to, on a play this role, I mean so much to me this story, like 15 years of developing the script.

Does 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, I haven't been in it, exactly how Hamlet feels. The word that is repeated most frequently in to be or not to be is the word sleep. It's guys 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 raw kind of vulnerable, kind of frazzled kind of texture, I think, to the to my performance that I could never have planned or controlled.”

You know, I think you can kind of feel a lot of exhausted kind of disarray in the performance.

And I want to see that's 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 and rap and you're politically charged album and I'm wondering, did that hip hop instinct shape at all how you heard and deliver these lines?”

Yeah, very much so, very much so. Here's my take on it, a lot of people find a block with Shakespeare because they're finding difficult to understand what the words mean. I totally get it, I often feel the same way. Here's a 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 this is a misdemeanor, the word eyeball is a word that he made up. You imagine here at that for the first time or what ball and I am what? He made that up and one thing 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 round, 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 thought weird enough to make you sit up. And we're supposed to do is receive 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 more people spoke about Shakespeare in that way, because to me it is much more like music than it is like in an English class.

Did you come to this understanding as at 17-year-old who's teacher introduced you? Did you see that connection? Because you were kind of deep in rap at that moment, at time.

Yeah, it's such an interesting connection to me. You know, I think it's 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 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 the Masters in classical acting, which is essentially just at Masters in just in Shakespeare performance.

That's when I started on the rap battle circuit in London and things like jump-off from battle scores and Bombay Bronx and, you know, compete in all these championships and so it did somehow in my mind feel like 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.

“Support for fresh air comes from WHY, presenting the pulse, a weekly podcast about health and science. Each episode is full of great stories and big ideas fueled by curiosity and wonder. Can you learn to listen to your intuition?”

What should electric cars sound like? Why can it be so hard to get an accurate diagnosis? How do fungi communicate? Check out the pulse available where you get your podcasts. As you've mentioned, Riz, you grew up in Wimbley and Northwest London. The son of Pakistani parents who immigrated in the 1970s, take me back to when you were teenage Riz and you were DJing and rapping. You started on pirate radio. How did you discover pirate radio?

I'd go every Sunday to Wimbley Market, which is why you'd buy the Chinese spring roll and immigrant kind of food stalls and the fake design and clothes that we'd buy and sell over there, you know, amongst that kind of working class and immigrant community. And pirate radio station culture was just, that was just everywhere, you know. Yes, you'd have, you know, the BBC radio stations and the other London stations, but in between all those airwaves, the ones that's all the FM frequencies that were not spoken for,

you'd faint crackle and then the voice of MCs or microphones that were broadcasting from the roofs of housing projects locally. And that's pirate radio culture. So it was there that was it 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 I was old enough to kind of try and hack off whatever faint facial hair I had and try and, like, grow it back.

“I think I, you know, I was at the raves themselves and, and, 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 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 the raves and, and on pirate radio. 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, on 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 old were you when you recorded the song "Post 9/11 Blues"?

So, I posted 9/11 Blues on my first rap track, it's kind of deliberately silly balls, so deliberately, you know, it's a satire really.

It's a provocative kind of satire and it takes the shape of 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 of paranoia and mistrust and the war on terror and being a young Muslim post 9/11, I was like, it's crazy.”

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 song. 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 meant that meant your word hit power.

I mean, tell you the best thing you can do to an artist who's trying to start out and get some attention to the work is ban their work. This isn't the era of my space that the song very quickly went very viral and it gave me a little confidence and an excitement about how maybe I can.

“If I say the thing that I feel but the no one else is maybe saying that that is, I can really travel, you know.”

My guest is actor, writer, and producer, Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new prime video series "Bate" as well as Hamlet, a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's classic, set in London's South Asian community and theaters April 10th. This is fresh air. If you're a super fan of fresh air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. Will UH-Y-Y has launched a fresh air society, a leadership group dedicated to ensuring fresh air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists, actors and more.

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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 Break Up, which is the first track on the album, which 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...

And this stray pale chick came to trade. I laid with her, came to pay. She straight slithered and 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, read and blew till I knew the right was white and knocked brown. I'm going to make you hate yourself you hand over your crown. She moved in. I was a guest on wanted in my own house. Just on my (beep) broke my (beep) dark me, scarred me, got paid off the same backshoe whip. Left me hungry. Took my industry and independence from me. Took my dough then let me money said that it was all to help me.

And she had beef with some German next man. I went to move her twice. Almost lost my left hand.

That was the breakup from my guest today, Riz Ahmed, and there's also a short film for the long goodbye, which kind of serves as a music video at one and 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 Ruudu poetry. And then reading 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 Raleb or if you look at, you know, a result of writing from South Asia, the Middle East from Iran, is often love poetry and love is used as a metaphor and the relationship and the beloved is a metaphor for God. But it can also be used as a metaphor for other things.

So I kind of feel like it's something that I wanted to borrow from that poetic tradition. And in fact, the breakup has an alternative title in brackets, which is Shikwa, and Shikwa means complaint. And that's because a very famous poem by Mohamedik Bal, he has a famous poem called Shikwa and then Javabhi Shikwa, which is complaint and response to complaint.

“And in that he's actually complaining to God saying God, you forsaken us as Muslims, like, you know, we've been colonized and destroyed and wrecked and like, you know, where are you?”

You said, we should take care of us being not there. And so I wanted to kind of like really touch on that because what I want to do is a rapper is,

I don't want to just be someone who's kind of like taking from this incredible African American tradition.

I want to also contribute something of my own tradition and my own heritage. And so I want to take the poetic forms, the poetic references, the musical backing of my own South Asian identity and my London identity. And the sound system culture there and infused the two. And it felt to me like a much more personal and much more emotional way to talk about political realities is, you know, through this metaphor of love. Or is this has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and thank you for the wonderful conversation.

Riz Ahmed stars in a reimagining of Hamlet, which opens in theaters in April, and the new prime video series "Bate". All six episodes will be available for streaming on Wednesday. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Phyllis Myers and Marie Baldonato, Lauren Crimson, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, they a challenger, Susan Yacundee, and Abelman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper, Roberta Shorock, directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.