Riz Ahmed spent 10 years developing his deeply personal Prime Video series, Bait, and says he was “ready to go and become a hermit if everybody hated it.” Instead, the audacious and inventive six-episode series — which stars Ahmed as a somewhat Riz Ahmed-like, London-born actor who’s just auditioned to be the next James Bond — has hit precisely the nerve he’d hoped for. “When you share something vulnerable about yourself, and it’s held and received and reflected back by people — that’s what it’s all about, I think.”
Famous as an actor for roles in the Star Wars universe and nervy dramas like Nightcrawler and last year’s Relay, Ahmed has always been a multi-hyphenate. He’s built a hip-hop career as Riz MC and in 2022 won an Oscar for The Long Goodbye, the live-action short film that accompanied his concept album of the same name. Though the projects are incredibly different in scope and tone, both The Long Goodbye and Bait are deeply rooted in the northwest London world of Pakistani immigrants where Ahmed grew up, and come from a similar impulse that Ahmed simply couldn’t let go of.
“I just had to express them,” Ahmed, 43, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “It wasn’t like, ‘This would be a cool idea, this might be fun.’ In some ways, it was kind of therapy. I had to unpick the knot at the heart of both of those projects.”
The specific knot of Bait, Ahmed says, is the tension between the public and private self — in the case of his character, Shah Latif, it’s the distance between the aspiring actor who wants to look good in James Bond’s tuxedo and the young man so unsure of himself that his inner critic becomes manifest in the form of a talking pig’s head, voiced by Patrick Stewart. (That hopefully gives you some idea of the comic, surrealist turns that Bait has in store).
“That gap between those two versions of yourself — someone once told me that’s the amount of shame that you carry,” Ahmed tells me. “The only way to get through shame is to laugh, right? So it’s an attempt to take the mask off. It’s a character who’s learning to put aside the performance version of himself and embrace who he really is, and in a way that’s what I’m doing by making the show.”
Hear more from Ahmed in our podcast conversation, including how he and his collaborators got away with namechecking James Bond even as a very real Bond casting call is underway. The episode also includes my conversation with returning guest Chris Feil about this year’s Cannes winners (including Fjord, the Palme d’Or winner from Cristian Mungiu) and a deeper dive into Cannes history — with statistics that might tell us about which films will actually be a success when more audiences see them. For more on Cannes, you can also catch a replay of last week’s Prestige Junkie After Party livestream between Christopher Rosen and me, where we attempted to predict the Cannes winners — go back and tell us how we did!
