Riz Ahmed—Oscar winner, rapper, and the star of Rogue One and The Night Of—is doing a lot right now, and he knows it. A film, a TV show, new music—all dropping in the same window. The first real question from host Jackson Garrett: “Are you trying to Tim Allen?” Ahmed doesn’t flinch. “I gotta catch up with Tim,” he says, referencing Allen’s legendary trifecta of simultaneous number ones. “This time we’re going to figure this out.”
The Tim Allen bit is funny, but it isn’t a joke. Ahmed has been grinding toward this moment for years. Hamlet, his new film in which he stars as the first non-white Hamlet in cinematic history, took roughly ten years to develop and another five to actually make. He wanted it out earlier. He’ll tell you that himself. But he’s also come around to the idea that timing is its own kind of authorship. “Stories have their own mystical journey,” he tells Garrett. “I’m realizing now that it’s supposed to be out now because the way Hamlet feels is how we all feel right now.”
Ahmed describes the core of Hamlet as “someone who’s grieving the illusion that the world was a fair place,” adding that the central feeling—”has the world gone crazy or am I losing my goddamn mind?”—is essentially the current cultural mood. Garret checked with his 90-year-old grandfather to be sure. The answer: yes, it’s the craziest it’s ever been.
The conversation ranges well past Shakespeare. Ahmed walks Garrett through the origins of his first rap song, “Post 9/11 Blues”—a deliberately lo-fi comedy track that got banned from UK radio after he was roughed up by MI5 Special Branch agents following an award win in Berlin. “I was like, I want to put this into my art,” he says. The ban, as these things tend to go, helped it blow up. It’s a thread that runs straight to his new show: Bait, a Bond-flavored spy thriller he stars in, comes with a full diaspora soundtrack he produced—bhangra, grime, UK garage, Pakistani rap—and a new track of his own. He name-checks Kneecap approvingly and sounds like a man who still finds the whole censorship reflex absurd.
Ahmed is also candid about the way achievement just doesn’t hit the way it’s supposed to. He won an Oscar for the short film The Long Goodbye—with director Aneil Karia, who later helmed Hamlet—and by the time he sat back down after the speech, his inner critic had already started back up. “You ain’t sh*t,” he says. “The thing you got, you got nothing.” He’s worked out a philosophy around it: the compliment, he explains, “exists in another dimension to the work.”
What comes through is someone who has spent years building things the industry wasn’t sure it wanted—and is now watching all of it land at once. Whether or not the Tim Allen trifecta materializes, Hamlet alone looks like the project Ahmed has been clearing space for his entire career.
Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode to hear why Ahmed thinks Shakespeare was the original reboot king and what it actually takes to Tim Allen your way through Hollywood
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