Hamlet, James Bond and SNL UK: Riz Ahmed on Reinventing Cultural Icons

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1:40Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. it. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, do you keep your head down and just take it, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. It's a far more confronting and radical speech than we've been taught. Riz Ahmed, actor, writer, Oscar winner on his latest film, Hamlet. We're all grieving this illusion that the world had some semblance of fairness and justice.

2:24Because of what's happening in the news? Because of what's happening in the world. It does feel like the old order is falling apart. We lived in a world where people in public office would conduct themselves in a certain way, where there was accountability. These things are crumbling. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:47Shakespeare's Hamlet is more than 400 years old, a play containing some of the most famous lines ever written in the English language. How does it speak to us today? There is a new and radical take that has come from the actor, writer and producer Riz Ahmed, someone who in recent years has combined the more arthouse project with the big-budget world. He was Oscar-nominated for Sound of Metal, a film I loved. He was in the Star Wars prequel Rogue One and has a new film with Tom Cruise coming up. Aside from Hamlet, his other current production is a series on Prime Video called Bait, a black comedy about an actor on the cusp of a life-changing role as James Bond.

3:38But Riz Ahmed has long been interesting beyond his on-screen work. It's nearly 10 years since he delivered a speech in the UK Parliament about race and access to the arts. And he's written about his experience as a Muslim with British intelligence, US immigration and airport security. In this conversation, we talk about creativity, politics, family life. He recently became a father. and first about Hamlet, playing a part he'd dreamt of since his teens and a plot that he believes is evergreen. I think the thing with a timeless story like Hamlet is that it always feels timely. It never goes out of fashion, right?

4:25It's about family and love and loyalty and loss and how do you do the right thing. These are timeless themes. They will always feel relevant. but I can't help but feel that it's actually more relevant now than ever I think there's actually a reason why it's bubbling up in a collective kind of unconscious actually at the moment you know you've had our film Hamlet you've had Hamnet out as well and you've also had Grand Theft Hamlet I don't know if you're aware of this Grand Theft Auto meets Hamlet it's the play staged in the in the video game world I think the reason why we're turning to this story right now is because Hamlet as a character, I think, is going through a version of what we all are at the moment.

5:06He's grieving the illusion that the world was a fair place. You know, that's really what's happening. He's grieving the loss of his father, yes, but his father represented a certain way of doing things. Perhaps flawed, but, you know, not as shamelessly unjust, not as brazenly kind of corrupt as the regime that his kind of uncle sets up. And so I think we're all grieving this illusion that the world had some semblance of fairness and justice. You mean because of what's happening in the news? Because of what's happening in the world, yeah, absolutely. In what way? It does feel like the old order is falling apart, doesn't it?

5:38You know, in a world where, you know, you just didn't do certain things, you didn't say certain things, where people in public office would conduct themselves in a certain way, where there was accountability. You know, we came off the back of the Second World War setting up international systems, multilateral organizations. these things are crumbling and so yes that's bringing to the micro specificity of the news cycle but to bring it back to the emotional level which is where i hope my my work kind of operates i think we're all feeling a sense of shock and grief and loss you know that the world was a fair place and actually to take the kind of parallels further just like hamlet we're actually being gaslit about it we're actually being told that there's nothing wrong this is business as usual and how things should be a new normal yeah when we're feeling powerless in the face of it and And actually, ultimately, Hamlet really realises, like I think many of us are, that we're complicit in it.

6:27We're complicit in the new regime of injustice. We're feeding the fire and the algorithmic fuel, you know, of outrage that seems to be kind of characterising our politics. Well, in Hamlet's case, he's driven mad by the wrongs that he sees around him. It understandably absolutely consumes him. I always think that one of the central questions of the play is, is it the world that's gone crazy or is it me? You know, that's certainly how I think we're all feeling at the moment. You know, it feels like we're living in a very unstable time, just as Hamlet was. And actually, I think there's some solace we can gain from turning to these, you know, canonical stories at this time, realizing actually we've been through this before.

7:09You know, we're not the first people to feel this way. There's an element of hope, I think, and we can feel a little less alone in that grief. You've been thinking about doing Hamlet for a long time, I think. Yeah, absolutely. How long? I first had the idea very precociously when I was about 17. And the reason is I got a government assisted place to a private school where I felt very much like an outsider for many different reasons. And I had an inspirational English teacher called Mr. Roseblade. He took me under his wing. He was a white middle-aged Jewish guy from Wolverhampton. Seemingly nothing in common, but he spoke fluent Punjabi.

7:46and he just had this kind of connection to to me and other boys who felt like outsiders in that institution because there were very few brown kids in this i think it was a class thing i think it was also just something about my my personality i think in retrospect i realized i was probably very add and i just i had to kind of push back and didn't do very well with rules so i was always getting into trouble and he gave me this play and said i know you think shakespeare is everything you're on the outside of, you know, this stuffy establishment kind of canon. But actually this character in the heart of this play, the most famous revered play in British culture, he feels like an outsider as well.

8:24So much so he doesn't even want to be in this play. He, you know, he's stuck in a revenge tragedy and he's not sure he wants to take revenge. And so he gave me this play and in it I found myself like so many people have before and since. And more than just the kind of emotional similarities to how I was feeling as a teenager, I found something I really didn't expect, which is I found massive parallels with my own lived experience as a British Asian. And it was really a mind blowing to me to see that, hang on a minute, this is a story where it's about who you can and can't marry. It's about everyone squabbling over the family business.

9:00It's where ghosts and spirituality are part of your lived experience. And there's even a kind a tradition in Jewish culture and in South Asian culture that is a central part of the story, which is if your brother dies and you yourself are unmarried, you may end up marrying your sister-in-law. It's a way of protecting the orphans. And so all of these elements made me think, wow, actually this story is for me and I'm not on the outside of this. It really reframed for me who can be in the stories at the heart of our culture and who those stories belong to. And so back then as a 17-year-old, I had this kind of dream of trying to democratise this play and kind of crack it open for a wider audience.

9:45But in some ways, you've made parts of it more elusive to some audiences in that there are parts of the dialogue and entire speeches which at times are in Hindi. So sometimes the English speaker is struggling to access some bits of it. So I think you've both democratised it and in setting it within a British-Asian family, you've introduced a different dimension. I wouldn't say it obscures it for me personally. The feedback I've had is that non-Hindi speakers absolutely adore the speeches that we've kind of translated into Hindi because I think what people connect to more than their similarity to their experience is specificity.

10:22You know, if something feels authentic, if something feels specific enough, that's what pulls people in and then they're able to find themselves in it. So yes, basing it in a Hindu family on the outskirts of Northwest London, a property empire rather than a Danish kingdom. It makes it more specific. But actually what I find is it actually makes it more real, renders it more vivid and more grounded. And, you know, the most gratifying thing for me has been hearing people say, you know, I always felt Shakespeare wasn't for me and I never really understood it. But this is the first time I've understood it.

10:54This is the first time it's felt real and tangible. And I think specificity does that. Rather than distancing audiences through points of difference, it pulls them in through kind of authenticity. And by being Hamlet, you get to say some of the most famous lines in the English language, the to be or not to be speech. Yeah, it's really fascinating, isn't it? Because even people who don't know about or care for Shakespeare, they know those words. They're probably the most famous words ever written in any language ever. You know, the play itself has been performed continuously since it was written somewhere around the world yeah right it's seen on stage in the hamlet film exactly it's never stopped being performed and so um but what i found really fascinating is when i started talking to my drama school teacher rob clare about this is that i think that speech is is massively misunderstood you know we think that to be or not to be that is the question is a speech about suicide broadly speaking right if hamlet takes a stage he's pointing a dagger himself or whatever it may be.

11:58But actually, if anything, you should be pointing the dagger outwards. It's a far more confronting and radical speech than we've been taught and than it is traditionally performed. It's actually a speech about resistance. It's a speech about, do I have the courage to fight back against injustice and oppression, even if it means I might lose everything. I might lose my life. Hence the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the call to arms in a sea of troubles. That's exactly the active verb there is take arms. You know, to be or not to be, that is the question, setting out the context. Whether it is nobler in mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, do you keep your head down and just take it, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them now what happens when you oppose a sea it drowns you is it's a way saying is i can fight back but i know this will only end one way with my death i mean that's a that's a really radical question that's a and so the way that we tried to film it and stage it was i hope as radical as as those words kind of invite us to imagine to be or not to be that is the question

13:21Whether it's nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against the sea of troubles. You know, Hamlet is driving down a motorway at 100 miles an hour in a BMW. We're now sleeping in death, what dreams become? We have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. Towards a massive lorry. You know, if the speech itself is a game of chicken, when he is daring himself to go to the edge, then that's how we wanted to film it.

13:53And I hope that it invites people to reimagine and revive the kind of radical DNA of this play. Yeah, it's a very striking way to do it, because as I started watching the film, in the back of my mind somewhere was, how are they going to do the to be or not to be speech? because you know it's coming. And the way you did it really took my breath away. But if you've been thinking about the play in Hamlet for such a long time, had you been thinking about the way that you might play this? Were these words that you said in front of the bathroom mirror or anywhere else? You know, it's so funny. It's like, what is it saying?

14:31It's like, we make plans and God laughs, right? And it's actually one of my favorite lines in Hamlet is there's a divinity that shapes our ends rough hue them how we will right you can make all the plans you want and i had all these thoughts and ideas you know going back for all these years about how i might want to do this when it got down to it particularly when you're making a film like when you're undertaking any kind of big collaborative project it it has its own momentum it has its own parameters its own limitations part of you know the pace and the energy with which we perform to be or not to be was dictated by the fact that we can only find a certain stretch of motorway in which to film it the runtime historically if you watch that speech in most films sometimes it's done in voiceover so it's a bit quicker but it's about five minutes it was like okay you got two minutes and 40 seconds to do to be or not to be so that's out of my hands right it's out of my hands and actually what i find as an actor is the fewer decisions i am making the more that i am responding to things out of my control, the better.

15:34Because it's authentic. I'm not acting, I'm reacting. And I think that the best things happen in life when there's an element of surrender, you know, when we're forced to kind of resort to instinct rather than planning. I'll give you another example. You know, I've been hoping to play this role for decades, you know, probably 25 years if we go back to when I was 17. And what I didn't account for is that I would, I would have just had a baby. My wife would have just given birth. We had a newborn. I was not sleeping at all so after years of kind of build up and anticipation I'm going to perform these timeless speeches on one two three hours of sleep I shouldn't complain about it because every time I do my wife tells me to you know watch it you know it was much worse for her but um Anil the director his kid was going through a sleep regression too so he'd had this kind of ongoing joke we turn up how long last night in two hours one hours ah I win and actually that brought a kind of frazzled vulnerability and kind of an unraveling that wasn't acting.

16:37Yeah. You know, you could see that on the screen. Yeah. And a lot of it is filmed in real close-up. So, you know, the camera doesn't miss any of that. Obviously, you're acting, but it tells us what's going on behind the scenes. So the actual motorway driving scene, how many takes? You're also doing that. You're driving on not much sleep. We didn't get a ton of takes on that because it was about finding a very particular stretch of motorway that we could control and all this kind of stuff with the stunt vehicles, etc. It was, you know, I think there's something interesting about that. I remember when I was doing Sound of Metal as well.

17:11Yeah. We only got a couple of takes of that big drumming sequence at the start of the film. I love that film, by the way. You were Oscar nominated for it. It's about the drummer who loses his hearing. Right. Yes. Well, I'm glad you connected with it. I think there can be something magical about embracing the imperfections of like spontaneity I'm trying to do it more and more try and surrender to the authenticity of the moment instead of trying to endlessly revise things with this kind of perfectionist obsession I used to have I don't know maybe something about fatherhood teaches you that surrender but I remember when we did Sound of Metal you know I was rehearsing for that for eight months I didn't know how to play the drums and we ended up having two takes of that you just got to embrace it I think it just kind of like pushes you to focus.

17:56So yeah, as much as I might kind of moan about those limitations, I think often in the end, I'm grateful for them. Your other new project at the moment, the TV series Bait, which is on Amazon Prime. I mean, interestingly, because we've been talking about Hamlet, a great iconic character, that also has a great iconic character as part of the storyline. Oh my God. Sharpe, are you going to be the next James Bond? What? Yeah, I guess I'm interested in stepping into the canon, stepping into these archetypes and subverting them and complicating them. And if anything, just adding vulnerability to them.

18:32Often these characters become kind of archetypes and suits of armor. James Bond in the case of Fate. Yeah, or Hamlet or whatever it is. And actually what I'm really interested in is like, how can we humanize them with vulnerability? You know, it's interesting when we first had the idea of kind of tying together all the personal themes of Bait and it is a very personal show. We had the idea of putting that all into the vessel of James Bond. Everyone said, there's no way you're going to be able to do it. It's just an audition. Man, imagine this whole time. Super James Bond made a shot you. Listen, it's an audition.

19:05It's a photo from today's audition. That's all it is. It all makes sense, though, man. James Bond is white. But it was to Barbara Broccoli's credit. We sat down with her, showed her scripts, explained to her, and I think she saw as well. Actually, the show's not about James Bond. It's about, I think, a feeling that a lot of us can relate to that life sometimes feels like one big audition, you know. And so we wanted to tell a story about someone auditioning to be James Bond because we all, I think now with social media and LinkedIn and Zoom calls, we're always performing a more put together version of ourselves than we actually are.

19:39And the actor's on the brink of something incredible. So a huge role is within his grasp and then his life starts to fall apart. But the Barbara Broccoli, is that because you needed her permission or at least you needed them not to sue you? Yeah, we needed her permission. She's never done this before. It's not been done. You know, she's never given up the Bond IP for someone to kind of make a surreal, satirical TV comedy, you know, within that playground. I think it's to her credit and also credit our incredible writers room. You know, we had people in that room from The Bear and Yellow Jackets and industry and people would work with the comedian Hassan Minaj and my wife, who's a novelist.

20:16She was in the writer's room? Yeah, brain's much bigger than mine. And we all just kind of tried to just find a way of, you're just trying to thread this tonal kind of fusion we were going for, you know. Yeah, and the actor's also, you know, part of a British Asian family. So, you know, your own heritage is reflected in it. But you said it was personal before, and I wondered how personal that the, you know, the actor looking for the big breakthrough role, like how much of yourself did you bring to it? I mean, so much. And again, not so much because I wanted it to be a therapy session or to feel solipsistic in that way.

20:52I just wanted to kind of be as authentic as possible because I think that's how people end up relating to things, ironically. I mean where to begin I mean in episode one my character has a panic attack in a music venue in London the Kentish Town Forum I had a panic attack in that exact venue I burst out of those side fire escape doors into that same alleyway where we recreated that scene my character gets jumped and attacked as a you know pre-teen on a kind of railway overpass in a park in Wembley that exact thing happened to me or a version of it in the on that staircase in that park in Wembley you know my my character is um approached by the security services you know after becoming a bit more well known as an actor and they say hey do you want to come and work with us literally that's happened to me several times you know since I've started my career I you know it goes on and on and on and and I just kind of honestly it was quite scary it felt quite vulnerable to kind of go there and share that.

21:52But I thought, if I'm going to tell a story about a character who needs to learn how to take the mask off, and I'm going to do that myself. You know, there's no cheating here. I have to take the mask off myself and kind of put it all out there. There's a moment in it that stuck in my mind where your character turns around to his family and others in his immediate circle and says, you don't understand me, essentially. I'm trying to make a difference. I'm trying to change the world so that people don't look at you and think you're worthless. I wondered if that was personal to you, the sense that you needed to break out and do something different.

22:35Because at the time you went into the industry, there weren't very many actors of your background and heritage and if they were they were playing kind of like classic stereotypical post 9 11 roles you know what i love about that speech is that it's something feels so kind of when we're working on that it needed to feel both like like there was a nobility in it and also like a deeply offensive condescension in it and that this character was motivated by both those things and honestly I think as an artist there is often that combination right you need to have an ego to think you have something to say and something to offer but if that ego gets too big then rather than offering and giving something what you want is you want to get something you want to get that round of applause you want to get that praise you want to get those accolades and so our character Shah is walking that fine line but certainly I think I've been through periods of my life where what I think I'm seeking is other people's approval you know whether for myself or yeah and whether for myself or whether for my community and actually I'd go as far as to say is that the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth you know depending on how much sleep you've had and how vulnerable you feel you we need that that kind of hug from the culture one day and the next day you feel actually you can give yourself that that love but I wonder is Is that because as an actor, the next role is probably always doubtful, right?

24:02You have that kind of industry. Or is it also because you think the pendulum is changing back, like the progress? You know, what you've described is just like getting to the promised land of roles that are nothing to do with your heritage. You've got there through Sound of Metal and others. But are there worries that society or the industry is rolling back on some of those things? You know, I do think these things work in cycles. I think culture works in cycles. History works in cycles, for better and for worse. you know i think we've been through periods where dominant culture wants to like kind of like regressively assert its its narratives and we've gone through periods actually of greater collective kind of self-confidence when we're able to let you know a thousand flowers blossom you know i i think that things never really kind of like stay in one gear for too long you know for for better and worse so i'm not too concerned about that what i am interested in however is something that i do feel is unprecedented is the democratizing of the tools of storytelling you know it's it's fascinating to see how some of the gatekeeping is no longer as effective as it was right now we have different kind of gatekeeping you know algorithmic, you know, and seeing consolidation across social media might undo some of that democratization.

25:28But actually, it's really fascinating to me to see like how these like kids picking up their phones can have a bigger audience than some of these institutions. And so that's a good thing. I think I think it's I mean, it's a thing. There are good things about it. There are things about it that maybe are more concerning. But this is the reality that we're in. And so I don't know if the pendulum is swinging back and forth, retracing its old steps. It's kind of like swinging into new territory. And that's interesting.

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27:52do you remember this book the good immigrant it's 10 years old you wrote an essay in it called airports and auditions right it's a very good essay thank you and i looked at it again and the reason i wanted to talk to you about it is because you talk about how or how you grew up. You say, since I was a teenager, I've had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rude boy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.

28:28Did acting come to you reasonably naturally as an extension of what you were doing in your own life? A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I look back on this and I realize it, it's like, I was playing different roles or at least different versions of myself, right? Speaking in Urdu, wearing Shalvarikamese at home to wearing Reebok classics and, you know, kind of fake jewelry and, you know, out on the street corner or then school uniform, you know, wearing a tie that belonged to Clive House named after Clive of India, right? You know, at school, it was, I look back and actually it was confusing but actually I think it was really enriching you know and for a long time I thought of code switching as this kind of like cross to bear but also kind of superpower you know that I was forced to kind of explore these different versions of myself I think now my hope for myself my hope for the next generation is they don't have to code switch so much and that they actually they get to bring all of themselves into any room they enter.