Riz Ahmed takes on his inner critic

We've smuggled products in the North Korea, and now we make it to our seventh continent at Harktika.

“- That's right, big for me. - Mr. Penguins, big for me.”

- I have another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Tonya 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, Sha Latif. Now he's been nominated for an M.A. for outstanding lead actor and 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 Sha in a Tuxedo, doing a James Bond screen test." He's debinair, 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?" "Huh?" "Sorry." "Sorry." "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 once or only at this time."”

"How are you blowing this audition?" "I know the speech. I know it. What are you talking about every time at the exact same moment?" "What is this a prank show?" "Wearing a hit in the camera." "It's funny." "I just have a very particular process. I've got my head around it now."

"I'm ready." "I'm sorry, I was just a minute sorry. How was your weekend?" "It was good thanks, I was just." "Go ahead. What did you do?" "Just that thing, thanks. Thanks, Jim." "Just my son, but I just stop it." "Sorry. In a while, 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 like headed from fasting. It's the holy...

“Well, mostly in month. It's called Ramadan. It involves no eating and drinking one. In the day, I'm going in it from the fire and a bit of a cultural understanding."”

"Well, I've just seen you drink how much it is. Six takes in her. 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 Sutton 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 field 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. Do you know it? Hmm, do you know it? I was wrong with you. Do you know who you are?

I'll tell you who you are. Your failure. It should be a shame to yourself. You are a shame to yourself because you're a shame to yourself. No, but it's not.

Come here. I forgot to grab your mic. Oh, that is so agonized.

Yeah. 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, I remember waking up in the middle of the night. Two years after I wrapped it on the night of and going to the mirror and redoing scenes. The whole world had already seen. I'd already been handed awards for this performance.

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 stars in a voice can be about him and I just wanted to be kind of like vulnerable and open about that.

I mean, I've, 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 crappy, 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 ris 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, um, well, I want to do the first part of what you said first, which is ris 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 me into you. 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 in 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 combining a 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 you're seeming on a zoom cool, 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 Shah is hunting down almost. And in chasing this, 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 scrambling down ideas for this show in 2014. And I started doing that because they said that gap between my public and private self started

an example. Oh really? Yeah, like the week that it got revealed that, you know, a cabin

new star was 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 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 got to test clothes,”

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, but the candles and pizza, I'm dressed insanely, I've got this massive laundry bag and I forgot to be pit properly on the checkout and the pizza and it goes off and security like yeah, this, he looked, 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 and I go, dude, I'm not shopping, I'm Star Wars man and they got, okay, this

person is 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 juxtapositions 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-show runner 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 partly also because my name had been mentioned in relation to James Bond casting and 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. So actually that's a perfect symbol, you know, it'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, 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,”

it's also think it's been weaponized and turned into an economy in some ways and a competitive race, you know, the 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, the Lebanese sometimes, so I think there'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 they, this is a conversation which is my character, Shah and his ex, Yasmin, played by the

amazing reto area from umbrella academy and polite society, and 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 is 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,

the Bond Gala, you know, like James Bond turns up at the kind of, you know, black tie event

and hijinks and sues, 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, and so we very deliberately try 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, talking to you guys on fresh air and I'm going to walk outside and slip on a banana peel and like full flower might 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 squabbling over what we're going to watch, you know, 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 pitch this, you know, 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 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 and that word is bait and what does that mean? I want to get a packet 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 our more 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 realise like, oh my god, we accidentally stumbled on the perfect title for this to actually communicate 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 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 I go, 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 this story, I mean he's such a hero. 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 it 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 at that level. You know, just the hum, 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, it's nothing but just always engaged, always interested, always show me to do it again.

Our guest today is award winning actor, Riz Ahmed. We'll be back after a short break.

I'm Tonya Mosley and this is fresh air. Fall is right around the corner. That means the midterms. Hey, it's Miles Parks from the Empire Politics podcast. Now is the perfect time to calibrate your news diet for the fall. Follow our show for short daily episodes that will help you stay ahead

“of the most important midterm storylines that you need to follow. Find the Empire Politics podcast”

on the Empire App or wherever you get your podcasts. How do products end up on big box shows? Well, we have plenty of money, pitch deep, and it money, board game. I'm trying not to think how much of a big deal it is and how much work has gone into it. It's really big. Is it helpful

if I remind you how big it is? It's sort of the whole thing. We go inside the minds of the people

who decide what goes on store shows. Listen to planet money on the Empire App or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a super fan of fresh air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. Double UHYY 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. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special”

benefits on recognition. Learn more at www.yy.org/Fresh Air Society. 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 immunomination for outstanding lead actor and a limited or anthology series or movie for his starring role as Shia Latif and the prime video satirical drama series "Bate." 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, and 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. In 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 Short. I spoke with him in March of this year. 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 to Hamlet. What do you remember about that first encounter”

with the play and what did it kind of unlock for you? It's really interesting. I am like many people felt like Shakespeare is there. It pits me everything on the outside of. It doesn't belong to me, it's stuffy, it's elitist. I got a government assisted place to a private school where I felt like an outsider 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.

I thought we had nothing in common but he spoke fluent Punjabi and he brought me Hamlet and said, "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 real of it. You might recognise yourself in this character and I did like millions of people have. Hamlet being a character who feels out of place. Hamlet himself feels like an outsider. He feels like he doesn't belong. No one understands and it

really spoke to me as a teenager, but more than that what I realised was, how am I going to mean it? This Hamlet story set in medieval Denmark actually is exactly like growing up in Wimbling. 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 part of the course. 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

do that. If their brothers died tragically, they themselves are unmarried with the consent,

obviously, of their sister in law and of 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, 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?

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 that okay, and you 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. How do you not make this feel like a kind of self-congratulatory like actor wants to take on the classic? And actually there was the opposite of how we wanted to feel and it would 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 know how to do this.

We need a director who's worked a lot in rapid 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 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, solidically, 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! We're not to be!" "Yeah, is the question!" Whether it's no longer in a mind to suffer. The things and arrows of our rage is fooling you. All the take-offs against the sea of troubles. But by posing and the night to sleep. No more. Or by sleep to say, "We are not to take a thousand natural shocks that flesh is there to

the consummation that felt we to be wish to die to sleep!" "The sleep has changed to dream. There's 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 a respect to take up arms. You know, what he's saying is, there's two choices. You can carry on being,

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 not 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 then the powers of be. It's dangerous idea. Actually, you can get you arrested.

We'd discuss that openly to this day. You and your director, A Neal Curry, 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, until I became actually an absent father in the sense that I was away for much of the day, awake before my kid was awake home after my kid gone to sleep. And I started to understand that emotionally, but actually, it was more the effect

I had on me physically, because, you know, I'm waiting to, I want to play this role. I mean, so much to me, this story, like 15 years of developing the script. I wanted to get him ready for this silly little quiz, and what would happen is me and A Neal were turned up on set on like two hours sleep. One hours 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 I haven't been in it. It exactly how Hamlet feels. The word that is repeated most frequently into 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, fragile 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 and honestly, 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, whose 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, very much so, very much so he's my take on it. A lot of people find a block with Shakespeare because they'd find it difficult to understand what the words mean. I totally get it. I often feel the same way. He'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 semester, the word eyeball is a word that he made up. Imagine hearing that for the first time

of what ball? And I, 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 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 thought weird enough to make you sit up. And we're just supposed to do is receive an electric charge of rhythm and melody and musicality, just like rap music.

Shakespeare in that way because to me it is much more like music than it is like 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 that time. Yeah, it's such an interesting connection to me.

“You know, I think it's 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 isn't also lost on me is at the same time of studying under Rob Clare

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 battlescars and Bombay Bronx and competing 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. History is intriguing, but unlike the present, it can feel far off. On NPR's through line,

we bring it back to life and put you in the middle of it. Go inside the stories from then that shape the world we live in now. Find NPR's through line wherever you get your podcasts.

You've got a lot of ways to get news and a lot of podcasts in your feed that take

a long time to get to the point. Here and now any time gets to the heart of the day's big story all in about 20 minutes every afternoon. Get smarter and expand your world fast. Listen to here and now any time on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is fresh air and today we're listening back to my interview with Immy and Oscar winner, Riz Ahmed. He stars in the prime video series Bate. For the role, he received an immy

nomination for Best Lead actor and 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 Wimbley and Northwest London. The son of Pakistani parents who immigrated in the 1970s. Take me back to when you were teenagers and you were DJing

“and rapping. You started on pirate radio. How did you discover pirate radio?”

So I grew up in the, you know, in the mid-90s, in the UK, I grew up in Wimbley. Wimbley is both, you know, the site of England's greatest triumph in 1966 World Cup and also, you know, in the shadow of that stadium, I'd go every Sunday to Wimbley Market, which is way, you'd buy the Chinese spring roll and the immigrant kind of food stores 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 one 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 rules 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. Soon as old enough to kind of try and hack off whatever faint facial hair I had and try and, like, throw it back, thicker, you know, I was at the raves themselves and, you know, I just love the music, I love the specificity of London's musical sub culture

“and the UK I think does that so well, you know, because of the the clash in the mix of different”

of different cultures and different sounds and influences. So yeah, I was exposed to it and then I started doing it myself, both at raves 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 I could honoured 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 deliberately, you know, it's a satire really, it's a provocative kind of satire and it's takes the shape of almost like a nursery rhyme or school kid's jingle. I wrote that when I was 23 I think, 22, 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

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. 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 is 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, that 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. Test stosterone, maybe you've been here and more about it. That low T can be dangerous, that higher levels could help you work out better, live longer. There's a really compelling and like strong marketing messages, but they aren't actually what the evidence supports. It's not some drug to promise peak performance

“or this longevity. What the science really says about testosterone on shortwave. Listen on the”

NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On NPR's wildcard podcast, actor and comedian John Legwizama, on a teacher who changed his life. And a map teacher Mr. Zufas said, if we can make penicillin of moldy bread, we can do something with you. Please use your comedy for good one to become a comedian. Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app or on YouTube at NPR wildcard. 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 longer by. 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 for now. It's broken down. Let me break down. I was a mole. I had the bling and the girls grit under 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 strayed slithered and stayed. I couldn't kick her out. She saw I was at war with myself and I'm a fool.

When you were at war with yourself, you're easy to divide and rule. She had me locked down. Beat me, red and blue, till I knew the right was white and not brown. When I made you hate yourself, you hand over your crown. She moved in. I was a guest on one tin in my own house. Just on my (beep) broke my (beep) dark me, scarred me, got paid of the same back shoe 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. 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 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,

it's 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 of 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 you 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 as 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 has received an immunomination for outstanding lead actor and a limited or anthology series or movie for his starring role in the prime video satirical drama series, "Bate." I spoke with him in March. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed. Like our conversation with actor Lisa Kudro or with national security correspondent, Joby Warwick about his profile on a notorious terrorist known as The Jackal, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of fresh air interviews.

You can also watch some of our interviews on our YouTube page. This is fresh air. 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 is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishafski. Our interviews and reviews are produced in

edited by Phyllis Meyers, Roberta Shorock and Marie Boltonado, Lauren Krimzel, Monique Nazareth, Fayette Challenger, Susan Yacundee and Abalman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly CB Nesper, Theresa Madden directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Billionaire Mark Cuban has stared into the belly of the beast of America's health care system. "I mean it's so bad you can go through a long list of really quality hospitals and they don't

know their costs." So, can Medicare for all be a solution? We take a hard look at the cost of the program along with U.S. health care itself. Find this and hear more stories from the indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app. On codes which we're asking, "What do we owe the people who

“raised us?" I think the public discourse makes us think that people who are strange don't care”

about the family or they're like selfish or individualistic and that really wasn't what I found. I found actually they cared so much about the family but they really wanted good families and they were trying their best to figure out a way to do that. Listen to the codes which in the NPR app or wherever you can get your pockets.