Riz Ahmed is no stranger to demanding, daring projects: His first high-profile role in the United States involved playing a tragic foil to Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler—though, if that film’s dark sense of humor resonated with you, you might have already been familiar with Ahmed from satirical British projects like Four Lions or Dead Set. His resolute yet vulnerable work in HBO’s The Night Of led to a record-breaking Emmy win in 2017, and he was a force to be reckoned with as a drummer dealing with hearing loss in Sound Of Metal, which earned him an Oscar nomination. And that’s to say nothing of his work in the hip-hop group Swet Shop Boys. Yet it’s Prime Video’s Bait, created by and starring Ahmed, that is his most personal endeavor yet. It’s also his most all-consuming.
The series has been almost 10 years in the making because, as Ahmed puts it to The A.V. Club, he kept trying to sabotage his own efforts. In the role of up-and-coming actor Shah Latif, Ahmed revisits several real-life experiences to play him. Like Ahmed, Shah is also a British-Pakistani performer striving to live up to expectations from his family, friends, peers, community, and, most of all, himself. Despite wanting fame, Shah struggles to handle it when rumors that he’s being considered to play James Bond thrust him into the limelight. It leads to a surreal, genre-bending adventure that forces Shah—and through him, Ahmed—to reflect on what it means to carry the torch of representation.
The A.V. Club spoke to Ahmed about the lengthy but rewarding journey of making Bait, tapping back into his comedic side to play Shah Latif, the significance of earning an Emmy nomination for such a personal project, and how his relationship with awards has changed over the past decade.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The A.V. Club: You’ve been working on Bait in some form for almost a decade. What was it about this story that made sense to tell episodically—especially because you hadn’t led a TV show since HBO’s The Night Of in 2016?
Riz Ahmed: It’s interesting because I can almost trace the origin of Bait back to The Night Of. I’m just making that connection now because, yes, it was about 10 years. At first, it’s just an idea that you’re scribbling. Then you share it, get scared, and put it away. But after I did The Night Of, that was when people started to get to know me in America, and it was a different kind of feeling suddenly in my life in terms of being a public person, at least in some places. Before, when I used to go to JFK airport, they stopped me. Then I started going to JFK airport after [The Night Of], and all the TSA guys were like, “Yo, Naz, did you do it, did you do it?” I was just going, “What is happening?”
So a lot of Bait was about trying to unpack that sudden schism between the existence of your public and your private self, and when the difference between them started to feel more pronounced for me. I realized in writing the show that it’s something everyone has or experiences, whether it’s on Instagram or LinkedIn or even a version of ourselves that is on this Zoom call. You put on a mask and perform who you’re supposed to be. And then you’ve got who you are in private, who you are basically around your family, the people who see through you, for better and worse. It’s an interesting thing I wanted to unpack.
I trace it back to when I was talking about it to a good friend of mine, Redinho, who was actually the producer of Swet Shop Boys. He said at the time something about how the distance between your public and private self is how much shame you carry. Making Bait is about me trying to close that distance in a way. That’s my long-winded answer for how I was already in an episodic space of mind for this story because I had just worked on The Night Of.
AVC: What was the intention behind pushing Bait‘s tonal boundaries so far? It’s a family drama, it’s a rom-com, it has surreal humor—plus that thrilling James Bond element.
RA: Oh, I’m glad you tasted all those things because that was certainly our intention. That’s what is exciting to me about TV because it gives you the opportunity to have a throughline with these characters to get to know and invest in them, but you also get to take them to a different place from episode to episode. Life doesn’t take place in one genre anyway. I’ve been in places where life sometimes goes from being a hard-hitting drama to a slapstick comedy in one second. I wanted to create such tonal juxtapositions for a few reasons. The show was many different things at many different stages during the process of making it, but what we knew for sure was we wanted to take those big swings.
It mimics Shah’s identity crisis and him not knowing who he is. It mimics my own experiences of code-switching and this journey of an actor trying to work out what role he should play or what genre he belongs in. He’s almost like a character without a story to inhabit, you know? Where do they belong? Where do we belong? We have to code-switch and transform, and often it’s not about choosing which one. I felt that if Bait is about an actor having this identity crisis, then the show should feel the same way. It’s a scary and difficult thing to pull off as an actor. It’s really a credit to the entire team of writers and directors, too. I feel proud because we gave it our best shot and we were trying to be bold with it.
AVC: Comedy is still the underlying thread of the show. What was it like to tap back into that after having done some intense movies? What was your approach to grounding Shah in these dynamic, unreal situations he finds himself in?
RA: In the U.K. at least, I’m mostly still associated with Four Lions. It’s my defining role for a lot of people, particularly of a certain generation. It’s a beloved film in the U.K. and the wider comedy community. And then even my first couple of rap songs were in the comedy realm. They were joke-y rap songs. It’s just been close to my heart and to my origin point as an artist, and I’ve missed doing it. I wanted to get back to it. I keep joking when I’m talking to my wife, or my friends Guz Khan and Hasan Minhaj, that man, I’m just going to go into stand-up. I remember when I was performing as a rapper early on, sometimes the promoter would come to me when I got off the stage and say, “That was great, but you performed only three songs and did 25 minutes of jokes.” I have such a love for it.
I also think you can go further within comedy and be more provocative with it. You can be more ugly, in the sense that you can be more needy and dangerous, and you can say things that are otherwise harder to say. You can take people on a more emotionally pronounced journey, which was the right framework to house this particular story in. Yes, it’s got different elements and is surreal and has that family drama and a rom-com, as you pointed out. But comedy was the powerful and challenging framework to put it all in.
AVC: On the other hand, so much of Bait is about the anxiety that comes with how people perceive you and the way you want to be seen, which seems like a vulnerable area to tap into as an actor. Did you discover parts of yourself through the process of playing Shah?
RA: Shah’s journey is one of learning to take off the mask and embrace who he is, whether it’s his messy vulnerability or his chaotic, contradictory self, and not having to feel like he has to polish off the rough edges. He has to think, “Maybe I’m enough,” and has to be honest with himself about it. That was the journey I wanted to go on in making this show as well. It’s a personal, very exposing story to tell. There is scene after scene that I put in that I literally pulled from experiences I’ve had in real life. These are themes and issues I’m still wrestling with that, publicly and privately, I’ve struggled with my whole life. Again and again, I’ve actually tried to sabotage the process of making this show. There’s a reason it took almost 10 years.
I remember after showing the script to people for the first time, I said, “Cool, doesn’t mean we have to make it.” After filming it, I said, “Okay, doesn’t mean people have to see it.” It’s definitely very daunting because it’s the biggest creative swing of my life to try and go on the journey that Shah is going on and say, “What if you see me for my mess, then what?” The hardest and most liberating thing about the journey for me is that, with some acting performances, you go to a really difficult place because you are going to another place, but you have a mask to hide behind. This was unique because there was nothing to hide behind.
AVC: Are there real-life experiences you were nervous about bringing to life in Bait, but now that it’s out there, you’re relieved to have done it?
RA: So many bits. It’s still challenging to watch the panic attack my character has at the 02 Forum Kentish Town. I had a panic attack like that on that stage, in that venue, when I was supporting Wu-Tang Clan in concert—I burst out of that alleyway and that fire escape. Then there’s the kid version of Shah, who gets jumped at the start of episode three; that’s literally where I got jumped behind my mom’s house that I grew up in. The sweet shop that Shah goes to on Eid al-Fitr, that’s on Ealing Road in Wembley where we actually go to buy sweets. So it’s countless things like that where I’m glad I went there with it. That was cathartic and liberating, but also challenging. Even the end of episode three, which is about a strained relationship with Shah’s family and community, that seems to be landing with a lot of people because home is often the place that you want to both return to and escape. Although with that one, we were also trying to pay homage to the Indian soap operas where there’s a big family event, and then there’s a thappad [slap] at the end, but we wanted to do it in a way that excavates the truth that the scene is grounded in.
AVC: How does it feel then to be recognized at the Emmys for such a personal show and performance?
RA: In a weird way, it reminds me a bit of how the feeling with Sound Of Metal was when we finished it. It felt like I had a vulnerable growth experience such that even if no one sees the finished project, I’m grateful to have gotten to go on the journey of making it. So now to be nominated alongside these big shows that are hour-long or have big budgets or are based on existing IP or are true-crime, when Bait is an unusual, scrappy half-hour show that’s hyper-specific, multilingual, genre-bending, and it’s a world and a family not often seen on TV. It was hard to get it greenlit, made, and marketed. We had to get permission from Barbara Broccoli to use 007. That we ended up making it at all is a blessing. It feels shocking, honestly. So it’s amazing that the show has been received and that people get to talk about it.
AVC: This nomination comes nine years after you won your first Emmy for The Night Of, and in the time since, you’ve won an Oscar and been nominated at the BAFTAs. Do you think your relationship with awards has evolved since then?
RA: This show is about looking for love in all the wrong places and how that can lead you astray. And I think it’s very human and natural to look for people’s affirmation and validation. As an artist, we have to dance like no one’s watching. But if no one’s watching, we probably wouldn’t dance. That’s my relationship to this kind of thing now. I hope it’s a lot healthier because I’m excited by the work of my peers, and for my peers to be excited by work is encouraging. It makes me want to keep playing and pushing and experimenting. That’s how I look at it now. You look for any kind of external validation as a marker of your worth, and before you know it, you’ll be raving in East London with glow-in-the-dark paint on your face with your ex.
AVC: Having put so much of yourself in Bait already, do you think there’s more to mine for another potential season?
RA: I’m not sure. I don’t know if Bait will go further, but I do know we have rich characters and we’ve only just started scratching their surface. This was more about Shah’s journey, but there’s more to mine from the other characters. Whether or not we get to do that, though, is not really in my hands, but I feel proud of what we’ve offered so far and that it opens the door for other people to offer their different perspectives.
AVC: Maybe Dev Patel, whom you name-dropped in season one, can cameo if you make more.
RA: Now that would be so much fun.
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
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