Riz Ahmed is his own worst critic. His new show 'Bait' explores that

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. A struggling British Pakistani actor lands the audition of a lifetime as James Bond. Word gets out, and the internet goes wild. And suddenly, his life starts to resemble the very character he's auditioning to play. He's in a chase sequence, except he's not chasing a villain. He's chasing acceptance. That's the setup for "Bait," a new Prime Video series that is part spy thriller, part family comedy, part psychological unraveling and entirely unlike anything else on television right now. My guest, Riz Ahmed, wrote, created it, produced it and stars as the lead character, Shah Latif. "Bait" opens with Shah in a tuxedo, doing a "James Bond" screen test. He's debonair, commanding, in control, James Bond personified. And then he forgets his lines.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BAIT")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Tell me, when it's just you all alone, how do you live with yourself? Do you even know who you are?

RIZ AHMED: (As Shah Latif) Line?

MAXINE PEAKE: (As Helen) Cut.

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Helen.

PEAKE: (As Helen) It's all good. It's all good. It's just we're on a bit of a schedule.

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) Yeah. That's why I was thinking quick reset, back to work. I'll nail it this time.

PEAKE: (As Helen) How are you blowing this audition?

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) I know the speech. I know it in my core.

PEAKE: (As Helen) Yeah. You [expletive] it up every time, at the exact same moment. What is this, a prank show? Are you wearing a hidden camera?

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) That's funny. No, I just have a very particular process. I've got my head around it now. I'm ready.

JASON RICKWOOD: (As Jim) Sorry, guys. We just - we have to...

PEAKE: (As Helen) Yeah. Well, just a minute. Sorry. How was your weekend?

RICKWOOD: (As Jim) It was good, thanks. How was yours?

PEAKE: (As Helen) Great. Yeah.

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) What did you do?

PEAKE: (As Helen) Just - yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jim. This is my set. Just stop it.

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) Sorry.

PEAKE: (As Helen) You know what? They didn't want to see you. I had to convince them, so this is on me.

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) I've got a confession to make. I'm lightheaded from fasting. It's the holy Muslim month. It's called Ramadan. Involves no eating and drinking. In the day, I'm lightheaded from it, getting a bit of a cultural understanding.

PEAKE: (As Helen) Well, I've just seen you drink apple juice, six takes in a row. I tried. Shame you didn't.

MOSLEY: Oh. This moment is the beginning of a wild ride as we watch this character unravel. And Riz has said, embedded in this show is a hunger to belong and what it costs someone when they finally get close to the thing that they've been chasing their whole lives. Riz is an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor who is known for many roles, including "The Night Of," an HBO crime drama in which he plays a college student whose life shatters after being accused of murder. In "Sound Of Metal," he played a punk drummer grappling with sudden hearing loss. And in "The Long Goodbye," he's part of a British Pakistani family whose ordinary Sunday is shattered by a far-right militia. Riz Ahmed earned an Oscar for best live-action short film. This spring, his adaptation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" opens in theaters. And, Riz, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

AHMED: Thank you so much for having me back.

MOSLEY: Well, after that failed screen test that we just heard in that clip, your character, Shah, goes to the dressing room, and then he goes over the monologue he forgot during the audition, and then he starts berating himself in the mirror for failing that test (laughter). I actually want to play that, and then I want to ask you something on the other side of it. Let's listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BAIT")

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) You knew it. You knew it. What's wrong with you? Do you know who you are? I'll tell you you are. You're a failure. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are ashamed of yourself, 'cause you're a shame to your family. You're nobody, nothing.

(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING ON DOOR)

AHMED: (As Shah Latif) Come in.

RICKWOOD: (As Jim) I forgot to grab your mic.

MOSLEY: Oh. That is so agonizing. A crew member comes. They probably heard the whole thing.

AHMED: Yep.

MOSLEY: You know, I mean, I love that scene, Riz, because that internal chaos, you know, it's - it can become a whole thing. It's never just an audition when you're a brown actor, is it?

AHMED: Yeah. I mean, so much of the show is taken from my own experience, you know. I'm that guy who - you were mentioning "The Night Of." I remember waking up in the middle of the night two years after I wrapped on "The Night Of" and going to the mirror and redoing scenes that the whole world had already seen. I had already been handed awards for this performance. I'm like, no, I got it. I got to get it right. and the inner critic is such a kind of big part of this show.

And, you know, honestly, like, yes, the show is drawn from those experiences, but it's not about being an actor. It's about, as you said, being caught up in a chase sequence where you're chasing acceptance and running away from your own inner critic. And so we felt early on in the show you needed to see just how mean Shah's inner voice can be about him. And I just wanted to be kind of, like, vulnerable and open about that. I mean, I've definitely - you know, I've done exactly that, like I said, going into the mirror, redoing the scene, saying, you're useless, you're crap, you know what you're doing. And I feel like that's something that is very, very relatable, outside of auditioning or being an actor or anything like that. It's - we're often our own worst critics.

MOSLEY: Yes. You know, I know a lot of people will be watching this series and thinking, is Riz playing himself playing a character? And so much of this you - well, all of it, you wrote. So it comes from real experience as well as your imagination. But what did Bond, in particular, represent to you as a British Pakistani kid growing up in London?

AHMED: Yeah. Well, I want to deal with the first part of what you said first, which is, is Riz playing a character playing himself? And if you don't mind, I want to say something that you said to me just before we started recording the interview. I said, look, how did you like the show? And you said, I feel like I am Shah.

MOSLEY: (Laughter).

AHMED: You said that, Tonya. You said, I feel like, damn, I'm that person, if you don't mind me saying.

MOSLEY: Yeah, right. Yeah.

AHMED: So many people have been saying that, and, yes, there's a lot of me in Shah. I think, actually, there's a lot of Shah in all of us, more than we like to admit. And really, the show is about this feeling that life sometimes feels like one big audition. You know, we all feel like we have to perform this version of ourselves that knows the script, that, as you said, is commanding and decisive and desirable. The best public version of ourselves, we're performing that. But actually, the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves, is often huge, you know.

And that's true whether you're talking about how your life is actually going versus the Instagram post you just got up - put up or that you saw of someone else, or, like, how professional and put together you're seeming on a Zoom call when, actually, you're not wearing any pants, you know, just out of the frame. And so there's - just to answer your question, like, I feel like I'm playing - I'm trying to draw on a feeling that is personal to me, but I think it's personal to a lot of people.

MOSLEY: And then that extra component, though, of playing the man, James Bond. Like, he is considered the ultimate, you know, in every way.

AHMED: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the show isn't really about James Bond, but James Bond is a very important symbol because he is the ultimate symbol of success. Yes, sure, as an actor, he is, you know, the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. And yet it's also just, you know, for any of us, he's this archetype of, like, like I said, decisiveness, desirability, being in control, being unflappable, of being invulnerable. And so I wanted the character of James Bond to serve as this symbol of aspiration, this unattainable kind of self that Shah is hunting down almost. And in chasing this symbol, is he abandoning himself? Is he abandoning where he's from? Is he abandoning his family? Has he forgotten actually who he really is?

And so the show is trying to deal with that. And I think that's something that, you know, we all kind of go through, where we're often pulled between the people we were and the people we want to be. And actually, the healthy equilibrium is probably somewhere in the middle, you know? Probably that thing you want to be is like an attempt to escape yourself. And that thing you were is maybe, you know, a version of yourself you need to evolve out of. But we often feel pulled between those two polarities.

MOSLEY: How long did it take for you to work on this concept, this idea, and come to what is a genre-bending series?

AHMED: Oh, man, I started kind of scribbling down ideas for this show in 2014. And I started doing that because, as I said, the gap between my public and private self started becoming so big and so stressful that it actually started feeling kind of hilarious. I'll give you an example.

MOSLEY: Oh, really? Yeah.

AHMED: Yeah, like, the week that it got revealed that, you know, OK, I'm in the new "Star Wars," and they released a cast photograph of us all on set. That same week, I got banned from my local supermarket for suspected shoplifting because my washing machine had broken. Only clean clothes I had were flip-flops, bright pink swim shorts, a bright green puffer jacket and a tank top. I'm dragging a massive bag of dirty clothes around to the laundromat.

I remember it's my brother's birthday. I haven't got him a cake. I go to Tesco's, I'm trying to get him a cake, they got no cake. I buy a frozen pizza with birthday candles. I'm at a checkout. It seems like an insane thing I'm buying anyway. It's like, yeah, birthday candles and pizza. I'm dressed insanely. I've got this massive laundry bag. And I forgot to beep it properly on the checkout, another pizza. And it goes off and security are like, yeah, this person looks kind of shady.

And we get into a back-and-forth. And I'm so frustrated, at one point I go, dude, I'm not shoplifting. I'm "Star Wars," man. And they go, OK, this person is definitely crazy. And you're banned. You're never coming back here. It's just an example about, like, the messy chaos of who we really are versus the image of success that's somewhere out there publicly.

And again, that's not just true for an actor. That's true of everyone who's posting their best selfie on Instagram, you know? So I started jotting down these little stories to try and just process them and make sense of them. I knew there was something in these contradictions and juxtapositions that was about me making sense of my own experience, but also that just felt kind of universal if I could just get a handle on it. And so I spent many years jotting down these ideas.

And then it was when I met my co-showrunner, Ben Karlin - we put the writers' room together and all this kind of stuff - we realized, actually, the perfect symbol for this show is James Bond. And that was partly also because my name had been mentioned in relation to James Bond casting in some articles and stuff over the years. So in the meta kind of spirit of this show, where we're trying to be as meta as possible and have fun with that, I thought, actually, that's the perfect symbol, you know, that's the perfect symbol for a character who wants to be anything other than himself. Who would he want to be? He'd want to be James Bond.

MOSLEY: There are so many good one-liners in this show that have to come from real life. And so hearing that story about you inside of the convenience store and saying, I'm "Star Wars," there's actually a scene with your ex-girlfriend who - she's a writer. She's a columnist. She puts this scathing piece out about Shah.

And in one scene, she says, like, point-blank - someone is talking to the two of you. And she says something like, he wants to play a white character, to which Shah, your character, pushes back with, he's not white if he's me. To which she responds, he wouldn't be white - you would be. And, oof, you know? What were you doing in that exchange, with that exchange?

AHMED: Yeah, well, you know, we don't really want to come up with any answers. I have none, you know? I really want to kind of, like, explore the different sides of the representation conversation in that moment, really, you know? I think it's an important conversation. I also think it has its limits. I also think it's been weaponized and turned into an economy in some ways, and a competitive race, you know, representation merchantry. And I think it also can sometimes be a distraction from real systemic change. You know, the tokenism of window dressing can hide, like, bigger issues that lie beneath sometimes.

So I think there's an interesting kind of back-and-forth that they have there that's really kind of getting into some of that nitty-gritty, but again, without answers, just trying to kind of put it all out there. But I think what's really interesting, actually, is what's underneath that conversation is a personal relationship about - you know, they - this is a conversation between my character, Shah, and his ex, Yasmin, played by the amazing Ritu Arya from "Umbrella Academy" and "Polite Society."

And really what's going on there, underneath the kind of sociopolitical think piece jousting, is two ex-lovers who are trying to jab at each other and push and pull and look for validation, and get one up on each other because they're hurt, because they both feel like the other has left them behind in some way. And what was really important to me more than anything, is that this show didn't exist in a conceptual space. It's about characters. It's about relationships. You know, everyone has the one that got away. And I was like, well, what if Shah and the one that got away have their whole, entire episode together?

MOSLEY: Yeah, it sort of flips the series for one episode to be kind of a romantic comedy.

AHMED: Yeah, we try and flip the series the whole time. And, you know, there's a spy thriller episode, there's a romantic comedy, there's a kind of surreal episode. There's one that's almost like the Bond gala, you know? Like, James Bond turns up at the kind of, you know, black-tie event and hijinks ensues. You know, we've got that. We've got all these different flavors. And we've got an Eid episode as well. You know, I felt like we've got Christmas episodes, Thanksgiving episodes. I want to have an Eid episode.

And so, we're very deliberately trying to layer in and thread multiple different genres, because honestly, I feel like my life takes place in different genres. I feel like right now I'm here, you know, lucky me, you know, pretending to be all clever, talking to you guys on FRESH AIR. And I'm going to walk outside and slip on a banana peel and, like, fall flat on my face. And suddenly I'm in a slapstick, you know?

And it's like, we wanted to have that multiplicity, that tonal whiplash, because honestly, that's just what I enjoy. And I felt like if I can make something that's a full meal - that is a romance and a spy thriller and a family drama, but overall, a comedy - then I could also just solve a very personal problem, which is me and my wife squabbling over what we're going to watch. You know, let's get in there and try and do it all.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, I'm talking with actor, writer and producer Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new Prime Video series "Bait," as well as "Hamlet," a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's classic set in London's South Asian community. In theaters April 10. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF NONAME SONG, "BALLOONS")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with Emmy and Oscar winner Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new Prime Video series "Bait," out this Wednesday - and in "Hamlet," a modern re-imagining of Shakespeare's classic set in London's South Asian community, opening in theaters on April 10.

I marvel at the multi-nature of this series. As I'm watching it, I'm just thinking, how did he pitch this (laughter), you know? How does one pitch something like this and get it greenlit - because it's so well done, but it also can't really be explained in one line, you know?

AHMED: Oh, thank you. That means the world to me, you know? It's interesting you say it can't be explained in one line because throughout the whole process, we struggled with that, right? And then when we got to the very end of the process, we actually found a way of summing up the whole show in one word. And that word is bait. And I just want to...

MOSLEY: Yes. And what does that mean? Yes.

AHMED: I want to unpack it for a minute, right? So bait is a British slang word, which means being blatant and in your face and attention-seeking. There we go. That's what my character is doing for much of the series. Bait is an online term about trolling or provoking people online - that's a big part of our show, as well, that element. Bait in Urdu means your loyalty or your allegiance. And that is something that Shah is contending with. It's home versus ambition, East versus West. Bait in Arabic and Hebrew means home. And so much of this show is a love letter to home, and it's about family. And how far do you travel from home in order to please home or help home, you know?

And then, of course, there's a big spy thriller element to our show, and bait is something that's used as part of a trap. And so it's that - so it's a weird thing where only in retrospect, we realize, like, oh, my God, we accidentally stumbled on the perfect title for this that actually communicates the entire layer cake of this show. It is all those flavors, and the word bait means all those things.

MOSLEY: That's remarkable that you stumbled upon, like, knowing those meanings outside of the traditional meaning of bait. That wasn't - when you all said, oh, yeah, let's come up with "Bait," did you have all of those before you?

AHMED: No, no.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

AHMED: Do you know what? I often have to explain what the word bait means to American collaborators, because I say it all the time. Often I'm - I'll come up with an idea, you know, we're spitballing in the writers room, and I'll go, what about this? And I'll go, oh, actually, that's too bait. That's a bit bait. No, I don't want to bait as that. And they go, what do you mean? And I was like, oh, bait means, like, too blatant. It's not subtle enough. And, of course, that's British slang, because the most important thing you have to be as a Brit is understated and subtle and, you know, reserved. And so, bait is a kind of derogatory kind of slang term.

MOSLEY: Sir Patrick Stewart - best known as Captain Picard in "Star Trek," - he appears in "Bait" in a role that I will not spoil, except to say that it's not what you'd expect. And I wonder what does his presence do in the story that no one else could?

AHMED: First of all, it elevates the story just by the fact that it's Patrick Stewart in the story.

MOSLEY: Yes.

AHMED: I mean, he's such a hero. You know, I don't want to say too much about the role he plays because it is very particular, and I don't want to give anything away. I guess I'll just say that working with him showed me that your art can kind of only be as big as your heart is, you know, if that doesn't sound too corny. Like, you kind of have to have a capacity for such receptivity, humility, generosity and empathy in order to kind of be an artist of that stature and at that level. You know, just the - yeah, just the kindness, the openness, at 84, to step into this story.

I remember having to explain, you know, various kinds of British slang and Urdu swear words to him, you know. He was nothing but just always engaged, always interested, always shall we do it again? Yeah, he was just such a pro and such a gentleman. And I'll really cherish that experience.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is award-winning actor Riz Ahmed. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TUATARA'S "L'ESPIONNAGE POMME DE TERRE")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is award-winning actor, writer, producer and rapper Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new Prime Video series "Bait." And next month, his adaptation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" arrives in theaters. Riz Ahmed has built a distinctive career in film and television, from a rebellious intelligence officer in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" to a young Pakistani American on trial for murder in HBO's "The Night Of," a performance that made him the first Muslim and first South Asian man to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor.

In 2019, Ahmed starred as Ruben, a punk metal drummer losing his hearing in "The Sound Of metal," which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He got his start on pirate radio as a teenager in London, competing in rap battles and recording politically charged music that got banned from British Airwaves. In 2020, he released "The Long Goodbye," a concept album that uses an abusive romantic relationship as a metaphor for the relationship between the U.K. and immigrants. The short film based on the album earned the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short.

Riz, let's talk a little bit about Shakespeare, because it wasn't really your thing as a kid until a teacher, I hear, introduced you to "Hamlet." What do you remember about that first encounter with the play? And what did it kind of unlock for you?

AHMED: Yeah, it's really interesting. I, like many people, felt like Shakespeare is the epitome of everything I'm on the outside of. It doesn't belong to me, it's stuffy, it's elitist. And I got a government-assisted place to a private school where I felt like an outsider for many different reasons. And I was lucky enough to have an English teacher called Mr. Roseblade, who was a white, Jewish, middle-aged man from a different place in the U.K. I thought we had nothing in common, but he spoke fluent Punjabi.

And he brought me "Hamlet" and said, you know, this thing, this story, this character, it's at the heart of the establishment that you feel so alienated from in many ways. But have a read of it. You might recognize yourself in this character. And I did, like millions of people have, right? Hamlet being a character who feels out of place. Hamlet himself feels like an outsider. He feels like he doesn't belong, like no one understands, and it really spoke to me as a teenager.

But more than that, what I realized was, hang on a minute, this "Hamlet" story set in, you know, medieval Denmark actually is exactly like growing up in Wembley. This is about who you can and can't marry. This is about everyone squabbling over the family business. This is about the reality and lived experience of spirituality, ghosts and spirit possession, which is par for the course. It's, you know, it's part of our lived experience culturally.

And this is also actually kind of pivots on a story point of marrying one's sister-in-law if your brother dies, which is a cultural tradition. I think it's actually a Jewish tradition and an ancient Hindu and South Asian tradition. I've actually grown up with people who've had to do that. If their brother has died tragically, they themselves are unmarried, with the consent, obviously, of their sister-in-law and over the conversation that they have, they go, should we get married? It's a way of protecting the orphans and protecting the widow.

So this didn't feel like this antiquated, kind of slightly out of touch piece to me. I was like, if you put it in my community, in my experience, this is right now. This is completely vivid and completely urgent. And it was then at the age of 17 that I very precociously had the idea that, man, I want to make a movie of this one day. And I want to set it in that place. And in doing so, I hope to kind of render this story more vividly, in a more urgent, modern way than maybe I've seen it, and make it just make it feel real because all those things are so real in that environment.

MOSLEY: What did you have to kind of work through to get to this adaptation? Because you could've just played Hamlet and put on a movie adaptation of "Hamlet" as it is.

AHMED: You know, I really believe that the amount of time it took was kind of quite divinely guided in a way. And that's because I feel that this is the moment for this story. You know, it's a story - "Hamlet" is a story and it's a character who is grieving the illusion that the world was ever a fair place. And I think that's how we're all feeling now. We're all grieving and reeling from this realization that, OK, I knew the world was unfair, but now the shameless, brazen, unfairness of it is just kind of laid bare.

And it's about grieving that illusion. And it's also about feeling powerless in the face of how unfair it is. And it's actually feeling kind of complicit in it and gaslit about it. And that's what the play is about. And I think that this is when it was meant to be told. But for us, creatively, the part that we were struggling to unlock is, how do you not make this feel just like a Shakespeare performance and a poetry recital? How do you not make this feel like a kind of self-congratulatory, like, actor wants to take on the classic? And actually, that was the opposite of how we wanted it to feel.

And it really took us meeting Aneil Karia, the director. It was after I collaborated with him on the short film "The Long Goodbye," for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, oh, I think we know how to do this. We need a director who's worked a lot in rap music videos. We need a director who has actually - can render poetry in a very raw way and give us raw action in a very poetic way. And that's what he did in that short film. And that's what he does in his films. And we connected, and we had a long conversation about how this has to feel like music, you know?

MOSLEY: There's the classic line from "Hamlet," to be or not to be, that is the question. And in your version, Hamlet delivers this famous soliloquy basically speeding through the rain at 100 miles an hour. And I want to play a little bit of it. Let's listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HAMLET")

AHMED: (As Hamlet) To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it's nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep, no more. Or by a sleep to say we end the heartache, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to - be a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub.

MOSLEY: That is my guest, Riz Ahmed, in his latest film adaptation of "Hamlet." And, Riz, you've talked about this before, but for most of us, we're kind of taught that this speech is about suicide. Basically, Hamlet is weighing whether life is worth living. And you came to believe something entirely different is happening in those lines. What do you think Hamlet is actually asking?

AHMED: Yeah, I don't think it's about suicide at all. It's about fighting back against oppression, even if you know that you will lose everything, possibly even your life. It's actually - it's very clear in black and white, in the text, the active verb here is to - is about taking - it's about to take up arms. You know, what he's saying is there's two choices. You can carry on being, and it's very interesting. He says be. Not living, just be - you can exist. And you can exist and just suffer all the oppression and all the unfairness and all the injustice of the world and all the insults that life throws at you, or you can fight back. But fighting back might mean you will not - no longer be.

So it's really about whether we are willing to pay the price of true resistance, you know, and it's actually a very, very radical speech. It's very confronting. It's tackling a taboo subject, really, you know, the idea of taking up arms and resisting oppression and then the powers that be - it's a dangerous idea, actually. It can get you arrested you discuss that openly, to this day.

MOSLEY: You and your director, Aneil Karia, you all became new fathers while making this film or were new fathers while making this film, is that right?

AHMED: That's correct, yeah, yeah. And that ended up being a big part of the process, actually.

MOSLEY: Yeah, how so? How did becoming a father kind of change what you thought this play was actually about or the process itself?

AHMED: Well, I guess it struck me that this is a play in part about fatherhood and about the absent father. And I didn't fully understand that until I self - until I, myself, became a father. You know, until I became actually an absent father in the sense that I was away for much of the day, you know, awake before my kid was awake, home after my kid gone to sleep. And I started to understand that emotionally. But actually, it was more the effect it had on me physically because, you know, I'm waiting to - I want to play this role. It means so much to me, this story - like 15 years of developing the script. I want - getting ready for these soliloquies. And what would happen is me and Aneil would turn up on set on, like, two hours' sleep, one hour's sleep. Like, 45 minutes' sleep.

MOSLEY: Because your baby was a newborn. Yeah.

AHMED: When the baby was a newborn, exactly - and his child was sleep regressing. And what I realized after the - well, first, I was just like, well, this is all just going to be a total failure now. And then I realized that, hang on a minute, this is exactly how Hamlet feels. The word that is repeated most frequently in to be or not to be, is the word sleep. This guy is not sleeping. He needs to sleep. He hasn't slept. He's unraveling from that, as well. And it actually infused a kind of very raw, kind of quite vulnerable, quite a frazzled kind of texture, I think, to my performance that I could never have planned or controlled.

You know, I think you can kind of feel a lot of that exhausted kind of disarray in the performance. And, honestly, that's - the version of Hamlet I'm interested in, is not the version who is the smartest guy in the room, spouting commanding poetry. The version of Hamlet I'm interested in is the most stressed and vulnerable and under-pressure guy in the room, who continues to speak because the words are failing him. He can't find the right words.

MOSLEY: I mean, Shakespeare was a wordsmith. He's working in verse and rhythm, and I'm thinking about your background in rap and your politically-charged album. And I'm wondering, did that hip-hop instinct shape at all how you heard and delivered these lines?

AHMED: Yeah, very, very much so, very much so. Here's my take on it. A lot of people find a block with Shakespeare because they find it difficult to understand what the words mean. I totally get it. I often feel the same way. Here's the thing - people in Shakespeare's day themselves did not speak like that. They didn't say that. Shakespeare made up like between 3- and 5,000 new words, I think there's some estimates. The word eyeball is a word that he made up. Imagine hearing that for the first time? A what ball? An eye. What?

MOSLEY: (Laughter) Right.

AHMED: He made that up. And one thing that he played with all the time was rhythm. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. And so in the same way that when I listen to some of my favorite rappers new songs, I don't know what they say the first time around, but I am totally wrapped. I'm totally leaning in. I'm engaged. I feel it emotionally. It's the same way. Your first experience of this thing is supposed to be like music. You didn't catch all of the words, but that word there felt weird enough to make you sit up. And what you're supposed to do is receive an electric charge of rhythm and melody and musicality, just like rap music. But that's not the actual experience of these plays. So I wish people - more people spoke about Shakespeare in that way because, to me, it is much more like music than it is, like, you know, an English class.

MOSLEY: Did you come to this understanding as that 17 year old whose teacher introduced you? Did you see that connection, 'cause you were kind of deep in wrap at that moment, that time? Yeah, it's such an interesting connection to make.

AHMED: You know, I think it's an inevitable one to make, really. You know, if you're interested in poetry, if you're interested in lyricism, if you're interested in rhythm, like, Shakespeare is doing that. He's playing in all those arenas. And so it was clear to me very early on, but something that isn't also lost on me is at the same time, I was studying under Rob Clare and doing a master's in classical acting, which is essentially just - a master's in - just in Shakespeare performance. That's when I started on the rap battle circuit in London and things like "Jump Off" and "Battle Scars" and "Bombay Bronx," and, you know, competing in all these championships. And so it did somehow, in my mind, feel like it's one thing.

MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is actor, writer, musician and producer Riz Ahmed. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOAN JEANRENAUD'S "DERVISH")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking to Emmy and Oscar winner Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new prime video series "Bait" as well as "Hamlet," a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's classic set in London's South Asian community, which is in theaters on April 10.

As you've mentioned, Riz, you grew up in Wembley in Northwest London, the son of Pakistani parents who emigrated in the 1970s. Take me back to when you were teenage Riz, and you were DJing and rapping. You started on pirate radio. How did you discover pirate radio?

AHMED: So I grew up in, you know, in the mid-'90s in the U.K. I grew up in Wembley. Wembley is both, you know, the site of England's greatest triumph in the 1966 World Cup and also, you know, in the shadow of those - of that stadium, I'd go every Sunday to Wembley Market, which is where you'd, you know, buy the Chinese spring roll and the immigrant kind of food stalls and the fake designer clothes that we'd buy and sell over there, you know, amongst that kind of working class and immigrant community, and pirate radio station culture was just - that was just everywhere, you know? Yes, you'd have, you know, the BBC radio stations and the other London stations, but in between all those airwaves, the one - all the FM frequencies that were not spoken for, you'd hear a faint crackle and then the voice of MCs on microphones that were broadcasting from the roofs of housing projects locally. And that's pirate radio culture. So it was there that I was kind of exposed more and more to drum and bass and garage, particularly when I was too young to actually go to the raves themselves.

As soon as I was old enough to kind of try and hack off whatever facial hair I had and try and, like, grow it back thicker, you know, I was at the raves themselves, and, you know, I just love the music. I love the specificity of London's musical subculture. And the U.K., I think, does that so well, you know, because of the clash and the mix of different cultures and different sounds and influences. So, yeah, I was exposed to it, and then I started doing it myself, both at raves and on pirate radio. And I remember when I went to Oxford and I got in there, I felt like I had lost something, I had lost this thing that I loved. And so I was eager to kind of keep it going. And that's when I started, you know, promoting my own club nights, and it became a really invaluable place where every week, without fail, I could hone my craft. I could try out new lyrics. I could gain confidence as a performer. And I think it helped me not just as an MC, but as an actor.

MOSLEY: How old were you when you recorded the song, "Post 9/11 Blues"?

AHMED: So "Post 9/11 Blues" was my first rap track. It's kind of...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

AHMED: ...Deliberately silly, but also deliberately - you know, it's a satire, really. It's a provocative kind of satire, and it takes the shape of an - almost like a nursery rhyme or school kids jingle. I wrote that when I was 23, I think, 22. You know, I just felt like I was surrounded by this circus of fear mongering and of paranoia and mistrust and the war on terror, and being a young Muslim post 9/11, I was like, this is crazy. Like, how do I make sense of this? And comedy is really my first love, you know? So I decided to kind of write this satirical rap song.

MOSLEY: It got banned from the British airwaves.

AHMED: It did, kind of, like, unofficially. There was a sense amongst radio DJs that they cannot play it because it's too politically sensitive. And...

MOSLEY: What was your response to that, and did it kind of feel a little powerful? I mean, that meant your words had power.

AHMED: Let me tell you, the best thing you can do to an artist who's trying to start out and get some attention with their work is ban their work. This is in the era of Myspace that the song very quickly went very viral, and it gave me a little confidence and excitement about, wow, maybe I can - if I say the thing that I feel but that no one else is maybe saying, then that is - that can really travel, you know?

MOSLEY: My guest is actor, writer and producer Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new prime video series "Bait" as well as "Hamlet," a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's classic set in London's South Asian community. In theaters April 10. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TOMMASO / RAVA QUARTET'S "L'AVVENTURA")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I am talking with Emmy and Oscar winner Riz Ahmed. He stars in the new prime video series "Bait," which is out this Wednesday, and in "Hamlet," a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's classic set in London's South Asian community, opening in theaters on April 10.

Let's talk a little bit about "The Long Goodbye." It was your first studio album released in 2020. There's a song called "The Breakup," which is the first track on the album, which uses an abusive romantic relationship as a kind of extended metaphor for the relationship between the U.K. and immigrants. And let's listen to a little bit of it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BREAKUP")

AHMED: Britain's broken up with me. We had our ups, but now it's broken down. Let me break down the whole [expletive]. I was a mogul. I had the bling and the girls, grit and the pearls. My cash was a quarter of the stash in the world. Then this stray, pale chick came to trade. I laid with her, came to pay. She straight slithered and then stayed. I couldn't kick her out.

She saw I was at war with myself, and I'm a fool. When you're at war with yourself, you're easy to divide and rule. She had me locked down. Beat me, red and blue till I knew that right was white and not brown. When they make you hate yourself, you hand over your crown. She moved in. I was a guest unwanted in my own house. She stole my [expletive], broke my [expletive], starved me, scarred me, got paid off the same back she whipped. Left me hungry, took my industry and independence from me, took my dough then lent me money, said that it was all to help me. And she had beef with some German next man. I went to war for her twice. Almost lost my left hand.

MOSLEY: That was "The Breakup" from my guest today, Riz Ahmed. And there is also a short film for "The Long Goodbye," which kind of serves as a music video. It won an Oscar for best short live-action film. Tell me about the decision to use language of love to talk about belonging and exile and loss.

AHMED: I feel that the poetic metaphor of love and relationship and longing is something that I grew up around in the tradition of Urdu poetry, and then reading it and studying it a little bit more as an adult. You know, a lot of Sufi poetry - if you look at Rumi, or if you look at Ghalib, or if you look at, you know, ghazal (ph) writing from South Asia, the Middle East, from Iran, it's often love poetry, and love is used as a metaphor, and the relationship and the beloved is a metaphor for God. But it can also be used as a metaphor for other things. So I kind of feel like it's something that I wanted to borrow from that poetic tradition. And in fact, "The Breakup," it has an alternative title in brackets, which is "Shikwa." And shikwa means complaint. And that's because a very famous poem by Muhammad Iqbal - he has a famous poem called "Shikwa" and then "Jawab-e-Shikwa," which is "Complaint" and "Response To Complaint." And in that, he's actually complaining to God, saying, God, you've forsaken us as Muslims, like, you know, we've been colonized and destroyed and wrecked, and, like, you know, where are you? You know, you said, we should - you'd take care of us, but you're not there. And so I wanted to kind of, like, really touch on that because what I want to do as a rapper is, I don't want to just be someone who's kind of, like, taking from this incredible African American tradition. I want to also contribute something of my own tradition and my own heritage. And so I want to take the poetic forms, the poetic references, the musical backing of my own South Asian identity and my London identity and the sound system culture there and infuse the two. And it felt to me like a much more personal and much more emotional way to talk about political realities is, you know, through this metaphor of love.

MOSLEY: Well, Riz, this has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.

AHMED: Thank you for having me and thank you for the wonderful conversation.

MOSLEY: Riz Ahmed stars in a reimagining of "Hamlet," which opens in theaters in April, and the new Prime Video series "Bait." All six episodes will be available for streaming on Wednesday.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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