Riz Ahmed

Is insuring films much harder because of the pandemic?

It’s lawyers’ letters, all of that kind of stuff.

Were you in London for the entire lockdown? Is it still home?

Yeah.

So, I’ve spent a week in your company, going back through the full Riz Ahmed archive of film and music.

Thank you, man. You’ve been helping my YouTube views? Gently shifting the Netflix algorithm incrementally in my favour? The cheque’s in the post.

Have you been able to take a moment during the last few months of stillness to look back over the choices you’ve made? Do you allow yourself pride in them?

I think often most of us – actors, artists, anyone really – tend to look forwards rather than stop and look back. Particularly with the pandemic. As to how I want the future to be different? How do I want it to be the same? We’ve all been reassessing the future we want to carve out for ourselves and for everybody, collectively. What patterns do I spot in my past that I want to continue? What do I want to fix?

Are you a proud man?

I’m proud to have been a part of some great things. I feel lucky. And proud to have done certain projects that have moved the needle on the way people see certain things. And to have said certain things in my music, and for that to have connected with people. You know what? Chadwick Boseman passed away today, which really shook me. A beautiful and beautifully gifted actor. We were just starting to see what he had to offer. When things like that happen, it allows you to take stock. So more than pride, I feel gratitude, man, for the journey I’ve been able to go on.

Does that surprise you? What would the 15-year-old you say if he could see your life as it is now?

I didn’t think as a 15-year-old that I could carve out a career in the way that I have. I guess that’s why I feel that sense of gratitude. At the same time, there’s the future 50-year-old me looking back, saying, “Keep pace. You’ve got to get to where I’m expecting you to get to.” I used to think of this journey as being a much more external one. To some extent, I still do. I’m not like some wizened sage. I’m still caught up in the worldly realm of comparison, ambition and external markers of validation. That’s natural. But having been able to do it for enough time to see people come and go, to be able to understand that things ebb and flow, I think of it as being a much more internal journey. It’s meeting yourself, accepting yourself. That’s starting to shift how I approach my work.

The need to accept yourself is the central tenet of the story of ‘Sound of Metal’, right? You start off watching a film about black metal, deafness and addiction and quickly realise this is about one man’s journey towards accepting himself.

That’s an interesting take on it.

It’s an exceptional piece of work, not just technically – what is done with sound in the film and how it complements the nature of all of your very physical performances – but also in its central messaging. There were teary moments for me.

Ah, man. Darius is a really special man. He really leads with his heart. He’s a very different person from Chris Morris in many ways, but they both lead with their heart. I always think that does show in a film, in one way or another. There’s that sensitivity. This is Fantastic Man. We’re living in a time where we’re really trying to work out some fundamental questions: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be non-binary?

And?

I’ve been thinking a lot about masks. The first half of my career was about learning to make masks and put them on. Now I feel like I’m learning to take them off. I think that’s true of a lot of actors. Somewhere in between it’s just about taking off the masks and looking at yourself in the mirror. What does it mean to be a fantastic man? What do these labels mean? To what extent are these masks useful ways of discovering things about ourselves, and to what extent are they limiting? Part of what is explored in ‘Sound of Metal’ is: What does it mean to be a man? Is it to be a provider? Does it mean to be useful?

Is it about trying to find solutions where there might not necessarily be any?

Exactly that. That toxicity element. Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.

It’s a good one. The parameters of masculinity is an endlessly fascinating subject. How male do you feel?

I think we’re all learning, particularly those of us who are not in the young generation who are coming through right now and talking about human rights and planetary rights in such an inspiring way. We’re all learning. I’m just trying to learn and be as supportive as possible.

Now that a generation has thrown the idea of gender up in the air to see where it lands, it does make me question what ownership I have over my own branch of masculinity. I’m not quite sure anymore.

That’s what I mean. It’s about deconstructing that label a little bit. When you train as an actor and do mask work, it’s about putting that mask on to find out more about yourself. The canvas of maleness, manhood or masculinity is useful in so far as it can be a blank canvas to project yourself onto. The more I talk to men about this, the more I realise that so many of us punish ourselves for not meeting some impenetrable standard of manhood.

So often when we talk about masculinity, what we’re really talking about is a very narrow band of alpha masculinity which very few men fall within.

But even when we talk about alpha masculinity, it’s so skewed. I don’t know, man. I hope that the gender conversation is a liberating one for the people who have suffered most from gender discrimination: non-binary people, queer people. But I also think that allowing them more space to exist and breathe will liberate all of us.

Was your character’s blonde hair in ‘Sound of Metal’ the first time you’d bleached?

Yeah. It’s the first time I’d had blonde hair. It changes the way the world sees you.

How long did you have it for?

A few months.

There’s a little touch of a protomullet going on there, too.

It’s stepping over several boundaries. It’s interesting because I’m not as easy to place racially, ethnically. I feel as though you do move through the world differently. It’s like a body-swap movie or something. It’s fascinating. Just on a basic level, I kind of liked having the blonde hair and being covered in tattoos. It’s imagining yourself into someone else. In terms of preparing for that role, meeting drummers in that scene was really interesting, understanding where that particularly obsessive quality comes from, especially with metal drummers. It is an obsession, to be technically that good. It’s crazy. This is the big gift and where some of my gratitude comes from: entering these different worlds and seeing these different lives. Punk, noise music, black metal are not scenes I’d ever been around. You get to understand what is at its core, which is essentially expressing vulnerability through that noise and aggression.

Being a rapper who grew up during a very specific era of hip-hop, did bleaching your hair feel like an Eminem moment?

It didn’t, but everyone I grew up with in my generation had their mind blown by Eminem.

Who was the rapper you grew up wanting to be?

My brother really got me into early ’90s stuff, so NAS was massive for me. And I was all about Biggie and Tupac.

In my week of Riz, I realised that I had made assumptions about you and your background based on your previous roles. Your work made me comfortably guess that you were state-school educated when in fact you were private-school and Oxford educated. Then I worried that by having made that assumption I was subconsciously racially profiling you.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? That’s the reason I always try and ground my characters’ backstories on real people. The reality is always more unexpected than you might think if you were to make it up. There is potentially a certain mould of what it might mean to be a leading actor or an Oxford graduate or whatever. I’m not shocked that you might have been surprised. Because I was often surprised to find myself in those spaces. I was surprised to find myself in the space of the British film industry at times. Now I guess I’m in a mode where I refuse to allow myself to feel that surprise. That can be someone else’s surprise. That’s their problem. That’s their issue. That’s their opportunity to learn if they want to. But that’s not on me.

What did a private and Oxbridge education teach you aside from academics?

I don’t come from a background where those were obvious routes for me to take, so what I learned from going to that school and to Oxford and from being in predominantly upper-middle-class or upper-class spaces in the film industry was how to be in those spaces on both a visceral and physical level. Most of the people in those spaces might not feel physically comfortable if the ethnic and class make-up of that environment was inverted. This is just a physical thing, particularly if you grow up on the back foot in a society that sends you certain messages of not being welcome or putting you on the defensive. You learn to be around these people and not go into a state of hypervigilance or defensiveness, and not wearing masks of appeasement, defiance, masculinity, supplication or domination. That’s one thing I’m learning even now, to put that armour away. I don’t need it.

Hold that thought in case the recorder gets wet.

Okay.

You were talking about the armour you still sometimes put on with certain people in certain situations that are new to you culturally.

I have a natural tendency to code-switch between different places, but I wonder now whether it is a hindrance. It may have been a core strategy for my own survival and for navigating in different social circles, but the bigger picture is: when I contort myself for someone else’s comfort, am I really stretching their minds? Am I really stretching the culture? So now, it’s more and more about meeting myself. Who are you when no one’s watching?

You gave an astonishing lecture to an audience from talent agency CAA about diversity representation in storytelling. It was really a tour de force: you mingled humour, personal experience, statistics.

I feel like that speech wasn’t: here’s politics, here’s activism and here’s art. It’s just how you see the world, how you see yourself and how you see others. Who’s “them” and who’s “us,” for you? How wide is your “us” willing to stretch? That’s what stories are trying to do: they stretch your idea of “us” and question your idea of “them” and jumble the two of them up a bit. It’s been a natural outgrowth of telling stories to interrogate how I see the world and how someone like me might be seen in the world. If you’re born into a certain body in a certain place and time, you will be called on to tell your experience. Your experience, if it’s not the dominant narrative, will inevitably be challenging to certain assumptions. That makes the industry political.

Your clarity and purpose in delivering that speech felt like a clear line-in-the-sand moment in your career.

In a way, I don’t feel as though there was a line-in-the-sand moment where I was an actor and now I’m over here, being an activist. It’s all part of an expansive idea of what stories are. Politics is a story. For me at this point in my career, now that there’s a whole generation of people coming through who are so vocal, when perhaps at the start of my career in 2005, 2006 not as many people were saying as much as some of us were, that burden of representation is shared. I can just concentrate on being a better artist. That’s something Toni Morrison once said, that racism is a very serious distraction because it takes away from the job of being a writer. Imagine all the books James Baldwin would’ve written if he didn’t have to deal with that shit. He may have written the same books. But he may not have. And that’s something I’m thinking about now. It’s something I’m only now allowing myself to embrace.

Company allows idiosyncrasy.

Yes, yes.

You can now be the best version of yourself, rather than…

Being a representative? Yes. I think there is that. Liberation isn’t just speaking truth to power. It’s being able to express yourself freely.

Was there an actor you grew up wanting to be?

Jackie Chan. Bruce Lee. You can’t underestimate the impact of these action heroes who are not white. They speak in a foreign language and they are real-life superheroes. I didn’t end up making films like Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee, but they were really powerful. Again, talking about strengths or failures of masculinity, it’s really interesting that those things could be attached to different races under white supremacy. That really shaped me. lot of people. It certainly fucking came up for me. This collective moment in which the things we thought defined us were stripped away. The validation was stripped away. Who are you now? It’s fucking intense sitting with yourself.

Where did your impulse to perform come from?

From a very young age, I was per¬forming at home for attention. Doing impressions. Prince Charles with my big ears was always a hit. Like every family who had a kid doing Michael Jackson, I’d go and freak out dancing, limbs in every direction, aunties watching. I literally used to explode on a bit of Coca-Cola at a family gathering. From an early age, me and my brother would watch films with the babysitter. They’d stick on ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ when we were six years old, ‘Robocop’, really violent stuff, and we just used to run around the house acting out action sequences. I just loved the feeling of being inside it, being able to channel my hyperactivity through that intense performance. It was letting go. For every kid it’s about getting attention. But it was weirdly less about that for me and more about what to do with all this hyperactive energy.

Was it about being in another space in your head that was not reality?

It was about escape, but it was also about being allowed to feel intense emotions. Going back to that discus¬sion about masculinity: we were not supposed to feel intense emotions. The idea of impenetrable stoicism is something that haunts men, that crushes men. The stage was a space where you’re allowed to feel and to ex¬press yourself intensely. It got you out of trouble. And I was always, always getting in trouble at school. It was a therapeutic outlet. It was that classic thing of taking a wayward kid and placing him in a boxing gym. Putting me on a stage gave me that kind of fo¬cus. It was less about glamour, though of course there were attention-seek¬ing tendencies in every fucking perfor¬mance. But there was something quite stabilising about it in me.

Has there been a moment in your life where you have reconciled yourself to being the man you are now? A “this is it” moment of self-acceptance?

It goes back and forth every day. I think it does for most of us, right? If we’re lucky there’s some degree of self-acceptance in there. But we’re taught to feel incomplete by consumerism and capitalism. That’s one of the things Covid really taught us. This is fucking fumes. It’s a mirage. There’s shit that is fundamental that we’re left with when all the distractions stop. Corona was the big workaholism-con¬frontation moment for me.

Do you feel emptiness when you’re not working?

Yeah. I think it’s just those voices of basically deriving your worth through doing. Being busy. Garnering that ex¬ternal validation. That came up for a lot of people. It certainly fucking came up for me. This collective moment in which the things we thought defined us were stripped away. The valida¬tion was stripped away. Who are you now? It’s fucking intense sitting with yourself.

Could you give yourself a mark, out of ten, for how you coped during lockdown?

Fuck knows! I guess I’d need to know how everyone else did. If I can get everyone else’s report cards in, then I’d know where I could put myself on the scale. I did manage to release an album…

How did dropping your record during the lockdown feel? The thing about ‘The Long Goodbye’ is that it makes you imagine, as soon as you hear it, what a great live show it would’ve made.

We were building something crazy, an immersive experience, in a warehouse for the Manchester International Festival. But my hope is still that we can mount a digital version of it for December. Maybe this could be an opportunity for people from all over the world to be able to see it.

Not just the people at an elite arts festival?

That’s the hope.

Has British hip-hop been slow to respond to the social division of Brexit?

Everyone’s got their own ways of doing things. I’m steeped in screenplays and storytelling at this stage in my life. So, I’ve done it as a very conceptual story. But if you look at someone like Slowthai, he’s been very vocal. Stormzy has been vocal. It is there. For this generation, it’s part and parcel of who they are: engaging with what’s going on in the world. What I really think is interesting about hip-hop in this era is that it’s become about the introspective, conflicted artist. If you look at Kendrick, J. Cole or Drake, they’re defined by being at conflict with themselves. Whereas before it was all about expressions of certainty and self-certainty. That’s part of helping us all deconstruct masculinity, too.

What does music give you that acting doesn’t?

Starting out as an actor, you’re picking between the subset of roles that are available to you. You try and bring your own filter to the work you take on and bring some of yourself to the roles. So it’s not a direct line to heart and mind. Whereas music has always been very intimate, personal and cathartic to me. It’s something completely unfiltered. That’s how it was at the start, anyway.

And now?

They’ve kind of rubbed off on each other. I feel as though my film work has become more personal. Before, I thought the remit for someone like me was, “Hey, be this person, be that person, be anyone but yourself.” Whereas now I feel as though my acting is more personal and my music has adopted more storytelling. Music for me involves a tremendous amount of effort. It does for any independent musician. It’s something I continue to do less out of a sense of ambition and more out of a sense of need. The thing that keeps me going is knowing how it connects to people. I wish there had been someone doing this when I was younger. Without sounding arrogant, I see the impact it has, and that keeps me going in those moments where I do think, “Whoa, what the fuck am I doing?” Burning all this time doing something that sometimes feels thankless and like a drop in the ocean…compared to how my film work can reach people and pay me, to how I can build a life from that.

Does it connect to that recurring motif you have in your life about crossing classes and cultures? Does music keep you connected to a place you came from, the further you get away from it?

I guess there’s something about it that maybe connects me to a part of myself at a formative age. It connects me to that place. But when I’m making music, I’m not doing it in my 15-year-old voice, or the Riz that was doing pirate radio stations at 18 or whatever. I’m making music in my voice today.

Yes, it’s adult, literate and fully formed.

Often, we can’t put our finger on why we do things. I just know that if I go a period of time without opening up my thoughts to myself – to try and order them, not just for myself but to take the scary step of sharing them, then I feel weighed down by those thoughts. I feel that doing that is healing. It’s certainly not something I’m doing for career purposes.

It’s not music to be played on Radio One.

It’s not, no. But the strange thing I realised is: the more you make music purely for yourself, the wider the group of people who tend to connect with it is. Something I’ve always enjoyed about rap music are the cultural references. When you listen to Wu-Tang Clan you go down a rabbit hole of Nation of Islam and Five Percenter mythologies. What I’m trying to do more and more is to bring my universe of the references that have shaped me and my experience and share them with people. Some people will connect with them and recognise them straight away. Some people will go on that journey to learn about it and that’s really cool. The important thing is building out that universe. It’s about trying to join those diaspora dots of our ancient lineage, Muslim mythology, spirituality and history, and to get us to where we are now, today. By joining those dots through art, people like me feel a bit less lost in a world that’s trying to tell us to get lost; we feel a bit more anchored, a bit less alone. It makes me feel a bit more emboldened to know that, actually, the proud history I belong to isn’t something that belongs to a bygone era, as if there was a cut-off point after colonialism and now it’s just dead, as if I’m in this wasteland where I somehow feel like I’m behind enemy lines. No. You can carry that proud history with you, in your blood, as your inheritance.