We rarely openly root for contenders, but there is one critically acclaimed show this Emmy season that deserves Television Academy members’ attention: “Bait.” The six-episode Prime Video limited series finds Riz Ahmed playing Shah Latif, an actor somewhat similar to himself, trying to land that next impactful role. When he finds himself in the mix to audition as the next James Bond, his whole world inconveniently turns upside down.
Produced and co-written by Ahmed, “Bait” came to life 10 years ago after the actor shot the acclaimed HBO series “The Night Of” and “Star Wars: Rogue One” in a short period of time. He soon realized people thought his private life was significantly different than it was. When someone told him, “The distance between your public and private self is the amount of shame that you carry,” it sparked something.
“I thought that was interesting. And I wanted to kind of create a subversive comedy within the playground of shame,” Ahmed recalls. “I wanted to actually find a way of laughing through the shame for myself and others. You know that constant feeling of you’re not good enough, you’re not cool enough, you’re not enough, and how it can cause you to do too much, try and prove yourself too hard, and look for love in all the wrong places. That was the kind of seed of the show. Later on, we realized, ‘Oh, what’s the perfect symbol for this? If this guy’s auditioning, if he’s always trying to be something else, who is he trying to be? Of course, he’s got to be the symbol of cinematic achievement, alpha masculinity, and British acceptance. It’s James Bond.”
During our conversation last month, Riz reflects on pitching former Bond steward Barbara Broccoli on the project, shooting in key London locations from his life, how UK intelligence agencies M15 and M16 attempted to recruit him after he became famous, how being “brown in the West” is like “living in a spy thriller,” his family’s reaction to the project, the “Before Sunrise” episode inspiration, his thoughts on shooting “Digger” with Tom Cruise, and much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: What are your thoughts now that the world’s finally catching the show?
Riz Ahmed: It feels incredible to have the show received in this way. It’s like you make something really personal and super, super specific. And what’s just incredible is to see people from different countries through totally different experiences really kind of find themselves in it. And I think that was always our goal. If we try and make something as messily honest as possible, it will feel authentic to people, and people will find themselves in these characters and this family and in this character. Yeah.
You mentioned how personal it is. Now that you’ve made it, you wrote it, you watched it. Is any part of you like, “Oh wait, maybe this was a little too much?”
No. I mean, usually the stuff that you feel like it’s too much, you want to not put it in, not for reasons of privacy, but because it can feel indulgent. I want to share the relatably personal stuff. This isn’t a therapy session, right? This is about me trying to offer up some stuff and go, “Are you crazy in the same way that I’m crazy? I think we’re all crazy in this way. What do you think? ” And the kind of crazy we were sharing was really the crazy making nature of shame, of how we feel that we’re not good enough. And so we pretend, or we perform, and we photoshop our profile pics, metaphorically speaking, through life and present this version of ourselves that is not at all who we are. In a way, it’s like we’re always auditioning. We’re always putting on this mask. And that’s why I wanted to share. And yeah, that can feel exposing, and it felt scary, but we had a mantra in the room, which was like, “If it feels honest and it’s true, you got to do it.”
Did that idea about exploring the creative process, what you’ve experienced as an actor, come first, or was it spawned by the idea of, “Hey, people are putting me in these Bond rumors. Wouldn’t it be fun to explore what that’s like“?
No, the Bond thing came really late on. The show spawned from about 10 years ago when my life changed a bit after doing “The Night Of” and “Star Wars: Rogue One” in quick succession, and I became a bit more known, and people projected onto me that maybe my life was like this or maybe I was this person, but actually my life was like this and I was this person. And someone told me the distance between your public and private self is the amount of shame that you carry. And I thought that was interesting. And I wanted to kind of create a subversive comedy within the playground of shame. I wanted to actually find a way of laughing through the shame for myself and others. You know that constant feeling of you’re not good enough, you’re not cool enough, you’re not enough, and how it can cause you to do too much, try and prove yourself too hard, and look for love in all the wrong places. That was the kind of seed of the show. Later on, we realized, “Oh, what’s the perfect symbol for this? If this guy’s auditioning, if he’s always trying to be something else, who is he trying to be? Of course, he’s got to be the symbol of cinematic achievement, alpha masculinity, and British acceptance. It’s James Bond.” We were like, “Yes, nailed it. High fives. We’ve got the right idea. Now how are we going to get permission to do it? ” Oh God, everyone told us we would never be allowed to do this. Sent the scripts to [longtime 007 producer] Barbara Broccoli, sat with her, took her out for a brunch, a very cheap brunch at a diner over here. She had coffee. That was it. And talked her through it, and she saw actually this show is not really about Bond. It’s about self-love, family, ambition, pretending, all of those things we just talked about, but Bond is a perfect symbol. And she just had one request. She said, “Do not portray Michael [Wilson] or me.” And she said, “Other than that, go with God. I see exactly what you’re doing, and I love it. ” So, I really want to shout her out and thank her for that.
Is that why it went to Prime Video because of that connection?
No, no. I had a deal. My company has a first look deal at Prime Video.
Oh, O.K.
This is when Barbara Broccoli still had all the creative control, so it wasn’t even up to them.
A version of your family or characters inspired by them plays a big part in the series. What do they think about this show, or have you purposely differentiated it to make it very different from your own life?
Yeah. I mean, some things are the same as my own life, like things that happen to me. My character gets jumped when he’s a kid in a park. I filmed that same moment of getting jumped in a park in the park that I got jumped in behind my parents’ house. My character has a panic attack at the end of episode one when he’s about to perform at Kentish Town Forum, which is a music venue. I had a panic attack on that stage and burst out into that alleyway. My character’s recruited by MI5 and MI6, and they try to approach him. I won’t tell you which way it goes if you haven’t seen it, but that literally happened to me. Once I started to become more well known as an actor, MI5 and MI6 reached out to me three times and said, “Work with us, help us with messaging.” And I was like, “Dude, I’m an actor. Best of luck. I don’t want to meet.” So, there’s lots of that specificity. The characters, they always become their own thing, man. A story has its own momentum, and you’ve got to ride the wave, and it becomes this other thing, and then you cast it, and these actors are so incredible. They just made it their own. Guz Khan took this character of the cousin and just sent it into the stratosphere in terms of just the specificity and the vibes and the humor. And I’ll give you an example. Sarjid Hasan, who’s a well-known Pakistani actor, plays my father. We had written the father to be this disapproving religious dad. I do Zoom with him for his audition. As soon as I open it up, he’s like, “Riz, you look like a dork.” I’m like, “What? You look like a nerd. Am I not clear?” And I was like, “O.K.” He goes, “Don’t worry, I can tone down my charisma to play the father of a dork if I must.” And I was like, “This is the guy, and we got to rewrite the whole role.” So, it’s an alchemy of process. Yes, you take the seed of an idea from your life, but then it’s process, and it’s the actors and the performers. And so it becomes its own thing. My family has loved it. I’ve been real blessing to see that. My mom was very moved by it, and so was my brother, and he took my cousins and aunts to the screening. And they said it’s their favorite thing that I’ve made. It could have easily gone the other way, man.
Most recently you made “Hamlet,” which I know took you a long time to get that made. You’re starring in this and, in theory, in a showrunner role as a producer getting it made. How tough was this just from an overall aspect of everything you were responsible for, beyond just starring in it?
I mean, I was all over this the whole time. We were rewriting because I remember one moment we were filming episode three. I was so exhausted. I had an intravenous drip of vitamins in one arm, rewriting the scene we’re about to shoot with the other arm and having a wardrobe fitting in my trousers at the same time. It was fully intense, but of course I had collaborators, mentors, geniuses around me, and chief amongst them was Ben Karlin, my incredible co-showrunner, and Allie Moore, my producing partner, Bassam Tariq, a director, and an old friend. And it was kind of cool because I think when you are forced to collaborate, what happens is I used to think, “Oh, that means you kind of compromise your vision.” Actually, what happens is you’re testing this thing continuously to allow it to be more itself. Does that make sense? It’s like we’re going with a fixed idea. [But] it’s like, nah, you got to discover what it wants to be. It wants to be its own thing. Story has a magical, weird momentum like that. And it was an incredible experience, super exhausting. But I think like childbirth, you kind of forget it and then you go, “Let me do it again.” But yeah, it was super intense.
My favorite episode is the fourth one, when Shah and his ex- girlfriend spend a night looking for her purse. There’s something about that episode that just spoke to me. I don’t know what it was personally, but it feels almost like a little bit of a bottle episode just about an ex-couple wondering, “Do they still have the chemistry? Are they still together?” Can you talk about why you wanted that episode to be in the series and what you thought was important about it?
This is a show about a character who’s looking for love in all the wrong places. So, of course he’s going to turn up at his ex’s door and be like, “Hey, what’s up? Remember me? My family hates me now, and I think the whole internet does. How are you doing? Should we reconnect?” That felt true. That felt right to the character. We also went into this show with the intention that every episode should feel like it’s in a different genre because it’s about an actor who’s having an identity crisis. And we figured the show has to be having an identity crisis. We need to do the old school Bond episode in two. We need to do a Bollywood soap opera in three. We need to do the Richard Linklater “Before Sunrise” walk and talk in episode four, which is the one you’re talking about. Then the Jason Bourne new school spy thriller in episode five. That didn’t feel like we were trying to be conceptual and clever. That felt like we were trying to honor the emotional state of a character who’s kind of unraveling, who’s an actor, trying to work out what story he belongs in, what kind of character is he? What movie am I in? But the whole series takes place across four and a half days. And that whole episode is not quite real time, but almost real time episode. And we did it with a series of oners, and it was a real thrill and a joy creatively being able to shoot in Brick Lane. It was “Before Sunrise” movies, a lot of these walk-and-talks. It’s like this beautiful kind of touristic Europe. And I was like, “Well, let me show you immigrant Europe. Let me show you the underbelly. Let me walk you through the back streets of Brick Lane and what that version of ‘Before Sunrise’ looks like.” And that was so much fun to pay homage to movies that we love, but to do it with our own twist on it.
You answered my next question. This is obviously a little bit of a love letter to London as well, but was that the one place you wanted to make sure was somehow worked in?
Wembley. I mean, Wembley is where I’ve grown up, that’s where I’m from, and that’s the heart of the show. So, we did this thing. Our incredible editor Mark Davies came up with this idea of putting up on the screen these chyrons. And it’s a nod to the Bond genre. It’s a nod to how in those movies it goes somewhere in the Caribbean, Mexico City, the Arctic. I’m like, “Well, actually I want to elevate and celebrate our daily experience and neighborhoods to that level of grandeur, elevate them to those epic stakes and go, no, Brick Lane, dude.” That’s on a level with somewhere in the Caribbean. Jordan Peele said this thing when he made “Get Out,” which is that being Black in America is like being in a horror movie. My thesis with this is that being brown in the West is like being stuck in a spy thriller. You’re already in one. The surveillance, the paranoia. This is like “Mission: Impossible,” but the impossible mission is self-love. This is like a chase sequence, but you’re being chased by your inner and autocratic. That’s our experience.
I’m not going to spoil it, but how did you know that one scene needed to be the end of the series?
I knew that right at the top. I knew it had to end there. Yeah.
On another subject, I was at CinemaCon and saw the still unreleased trailer for Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s “Digger,” which is unbelievable. And I keep telling everyone it’s not what anyone expects whatsoever. You are clearly part of it in what we saw. Can you just talk about what that experience was like and how it was what you might have expected?
[Ahmed is quiet. Thinking.]
Oh, he’s thinking. [Laughs.]
The experience was totally unique, really thrilling, kind of insane, and magical. You’re working with Inarritu and Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki] and Tom Cruise and Sandra Huller and Jesse Plemons and John Goodman and all these incredible people…it was just inspiring to be around. Honestly, every day I just felt inspired. I was like, “Oh, look what they’re doing there. O.K., cool. Yeah. Oh no, let me try that. ” And I think we all had to find a process that was maybe different to how we normally worked because of the nature of the material, the nature of the people steering the ship and their intentions, and how the process and the product sometimes have to mirror each other. So, we all went out of our comfort zone to a new place together, and that’s what it’s all about, man. I mean, I don’t know, in terms of creative growth, I was just buzzing off of that. I just remember just making notes like, “Oh, wow. I’ve unlocked this insight or this thing,” and that’s all I can say.
“Bait” is available on Prime Video
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