IN 2006, THE British Pakistani actor and rapper Riz Ahmed released a single called “Post-9/11 Blues.” In the music video, he wears a neon green clown wig in one scene and ducks under a fighter jet while crossing a London street in another: “It’s OK,” he raps. “Post-9/11 I’ve been getting paid, playing terrorists on telly, getting songs made!” For Ahmed, who would go on to win an Oscar and Emmy, both firsts for a South Asian Muslim artist, the video is a time capsule; it’s the kind of brash work an artist might make with friends before the world was watching him. But Ahmed’s costumes also proved early on that, with every new character and concept, he was game to remake himself.
“You’ve got to put the offering on the fire, see what happens,” he tells me. We’re at a cafe in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood in June, talking about collaborating with other actors and storytelling as an “ancient technology” of connection. Ahmed is aware that this all might sound “pretentious” in a culture that mistakes art for mere entertainment. “We love creatives,” he says, although the act of creation stands in “direct contradiction to everything our society is based on: [It’s] egoless, selfless, immaterial in a world of materialism.” Ego might drive an artist onstage in the first place, he admits, but in the moment of performance, the intention ideally shifts from “listen to me” or “look at me” to “look at this.”
Ahmed, 42, lives in northwest London, but he’s come to New York with his family — his wife, Fatima Farheen Mirza, 34, a novelist, and their child, a toddler whose age and gender Ahmed asks that I not disclose — for the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of “Relay,” an espionage thriller directed by David Mackenzie that opens this weekend. It’s the morning after the screening and he arrives a bit late, friendly and energetic, wearing a white footballer’s windbreaker and already carrying takeout coffee. His brown eyes are bright, and he’s full of ideas, though he’s pleased to hear others: “Yeah, man!” he’ll periodically respond to me.
Ahmed was studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford when Islamist terrorists bombed the London Underground in 2005 — one catalyst for “Post-9/11 Blues.” The video went viral and led to his first film role, in the 2006 docudrama “The Road to Guantánamo.” In 2016, he won an Emmy for his performance in the HBO series “The Night Of” as a Pakistani American college student accused of murder. He was then nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his role in “Sound of Metal” (2019), in which he plays a recovering heroin addict and drummer who loses much of his hearing. In 2020, he created an Oscar-winning short film and a concept album, both called “The Long Goodbye.” He’s now finishing an untitled Amazon original series that he produced, wrote and stars in. A new film version of “Hamlet,” in which he plays the lead, has just completed postproduction.
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