In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Riz Ahmed likes to get personal. You learn that from talking to him (as we did on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast), but it’s also readily apparent in his work. Case in point: “Bait,” the Prime Video limited series he created and starred in, which follows an actor, Shah Latif (Ahmed), facing an existential crisis after his name is linked to the role of James Bond. It’s the exact question posed by the show—how can you possibly stay true to yourself in the face of what Hollywood wants you to be—and one the actor has mulled over since his 2014 breakout role in “Nightcrawler.”
“The challenge for me as an actor has always been, for anything I do: How can I make this more personal? Whether it’s ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Venom’ or ‘Sound of Metal,’ how can I try to create from a more personal space?” he tells us. “ ‘Mogul Mowgli’ and ‘Sound of Metal,’ that was a period of time directly after I’d done a bunch of bigger stuff like ‘Venom’ and ‘Rogue One,’ and it was a real deliberate attempt to say, ‘I want my work to remain personal, and I want to bring my personal experiences to the table in a vulnerable way.’ ”
“Bait” earned Ahmed his third Emmy nomination—he won in 2017 for “The Night Of”—recognition he finds particularly gratifying because “it's very much an underdog show in the grand scheme of things,” he says. “It's multilingual, genre-bending; it’s kind of quirky. It doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. That scrappy underdog feeling is both the gift and the curse of those smaller indie sets. But I've always loved that. And it’s certainly the feeling we had on ‘Bait.’ ”
Production on “Bait” overlapped with Ahmed’s upcoming role in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” the still-mysterious comedy that marks a return to non-action acting for Tom Cruise. (Ahmed literally hopped in a car from his last day on “Bait” and headed to the film shoot.) The process he found on that set pushed him to go more daring during “Bait” post-production.
“Inevitably things rub off on you. Working with Alejandro and Tom and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki] and all these amazing actors, and particularly Alejandro’s vision, it’s just so specifically singular and bold,” he says. “What it gave me was confidence, and dared me to try and be as bold as possible as we were editing and cutting and creating the soundscape and scripting the reshoots and everything for ‘Bait.’ ”
“It reminded me,” he continues, “just how exciting it is to be unapologetic. That’s what Alejandro is, that’s what his vision is, that’s what the experience was of working with him.”
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