James Bond: a coveted role for a male actor in his 30s or 40s, one requiring drama, stunts and style. It’s the kind of role that distinguishes a career and turns an already compelling actor into a household name. In the world of theater, it’s Hamlet, the doomed prince who delivers breathtaking soliloquies about the nature of humanity. Both roles are, in a sense, sacred: Hamlet makes an actor, and Bond mints a star.
Like almost all iconic parts that go back centuries and most that go back just decades, they are overwhelmingly white roles. The actor Riz Ahmed, who has spoken out about representation throughout his career, is the perfect person to tackle two of these classic roles and challenge the way we define and imagine these protagonists. In the Prime Video series “Bait,” Ahmed addresses the novel prospect of a nonwhite James Bond head-on, with pointed satire; Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet” film simply supplants the would-be white prince from his place in Denmark to Ahmed as a princely young Pakistani man in modern-day England.
In “Bait,” Ahmed plays Shahjehan Latif, a London-based Pakistani actor in the running for the role of a lifetime: James Bond. But Shahjehan, nicknamed Shah, botches his audition, and the rest of the series follows his attempts to get back in the running for the big role. His main obstacle isn’t just remembering lines, though: He struggles to stay true to his family and community, to negotiate his ethnicity with the expectations around a typically white male hero.
“James Bond’s white!” Shah’s cousin and best friend, Zulfi, comically exclaims when Shah’s family finds out about his audition. “Maybe down the brown,” his agent advises him at another point. Amid the media buzz around his audition, Shah’s ex-girlfriend writes an article criticizing him for selling out and using a filter online to make himself look more white.
“Bait” literalizes the rift between the actor, Shah, and the role, James Bond, because the action hero was never designed in his image. Shah imagines Bond as a kind of wild alter ego he catches glimpses of in the mirror or in his dreams. He’s stoic, steely and quietly vicious. Ahmed’s performance as Shah as James Bond appropriately represents Bond as a symbol, colorless and brutal — handsome and charming but with nothing of substance underneath. What makes him so competent and so deadly is that he is just this chameleon of a figure. Even in the guise of a brown man, this Bond is so whitewashed in every other way — absent family, friends and connections to any specific nonwhite cultural background or traditions — that he is truly the worst realization of Shah’s self, one that will submit to his own cultural erasure for popularity’s sake.
There’s a similar brand of self-consciousness in “Hamlet,” which is set within a South Asian family. This Hamlet wears a kurta and King Hamlet’s ghost speaks to his son in Hindi. Hamlet’s play-within-a-play is a stunning performative dance set to qawwali, Sufi devotional music.
And for all the richness and novelty that the cultural details bring to the film, this more condensed “Hamlet” flattens the characters and skips past a more nuanced reading of the melancholy prince’s thoughts and dispositions.
Ahmed’s a talented actor, his version of the prince a perfect picture of solipsism. His eyes quietly, swiftly take in everything around him and reflect back the most distinctly defined mix of emotions and reactions. Ahmed’s Hamlet is neurotic and endlessly inquisitive, but there are only slight notes of Hamlet’s cynicism, fatalism and otherwise paradoxical nature. The camera swivels around him, watching him as he seems to speak to an invisible audience from the center of a thrust stage. Karia’s direction so loudly telegraphs Hamlet’s isolation and dejection that it leaves little space for Ahmed to bring more subtlety to the character.
Watching “Bait” and “Hamlet” is to see how Ahmed is, in a way, looking at an image of himself in the silhouette of the character, particularly as a South Asian man — and daring the audience to see that image alongside him. The performances themselves are a statement, that Ahmed never forgets that he is a brown man at the center of the action.
After all, Ahmed is a vocal advocate for more diverse representation in entertainment, and he has playfully pitched himself as the next actor to take on the Bond role. A few years ago, Carvell Wallace wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Ahmed “is not out to co-opt the world to him. Rather, he is looking to elbow out a space for himself in the world, to prove that it should exist.”
At the end of “Bait,” Shah redeems himself by nailing his second audition. He’s asked to end his tape with 007’s signature introductory line: “The name’s Bond, James Bond.” But instead, he declares his real name, saying, “The name’s … Shahjehan.” The moment represents him proudly accepting his cultural identity and rejecting the limitations of a role, like Bond, or like Prince Hamlet, designed with whiteness in mind.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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