Riz Ahmed had a mantra in the writer's room on the set of Bait: “If it feels scary and true, you have to do it.”
But that was easier said than done. The British actor, writer, and musician has long been one of the loudest public voices on identity, belonging and representation. In interviews, speeches, albums and films, Ahmed, 43, has examined what it means to be British, Muslim, Pakistani and brown in an industry – and a country – that has often struggled to see those identities in full.
But Bait goes somewhere far more uncomfortable. After years of using his work to break down the world around him, Ahmed was finally venturing inward. At times, it was a painful journey.
“The show is a coming of age for this character, but it’s also a coming of age for me,” Ahmed tells The National. “It’s been a journey of trying to embrace my experience, my neuroses, my messiness, my vulnerability, and share it and own it in a way that can feel quite scary at times.
“It was so personal, and sometimes you're worried about whether people are even able to relate to it, because you're about to articulate it in a way never done before.”
In many ways, his career had been building to this. In Four Lions, The Night Of, Mogul Mowgli, Sound of Metal and his Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye, Ahmed has returned again and again to characters being pushed to the edge by faith, fame, illness, grief, ambition and the gaze of others.
But none of that was ever quite like Bait. The six-part series, created by and starring Ahmed, follows Shah Latif, a British-Pakistani actor whose life begins to unravel after a failed audition to play James Bond becomes the centre of a media storm.
While Shah may have not reached the heights of his real-life counterpart, Ahmed says every element was rooted in his own experiences.
“We were shooting in the old neighbourhood I grew up in,” he says. “The music on this show is some of my favourite songs. like: 'If I die tomorrow, play it at the funeral.' It’s that kind of stuff.”
That was the easy part. The hardest truth to accept was that one of Bait's most disturbing elements – a severed pig's head placed in front of Shah's house as a hate crime that becomes the racist voice inside his own head – is based on Ahmed's lived reality.
“I found it interesting and a bit dangerous,” he says.” I was trying to look at self-hatred and how we internalise the prejudice against ourselves.
“I was trying to own the fact that we keep that voice close sometimes – and we use our inner critic as motivation. Self-hatred can be a great motivator, even if it's not a sustainable motivator. I'm trying to say it's not just about the hate out there. It's about how we take that, cultivate it and hold it close, because in some strange way, we think we need it.”
Shah’s actions, then, can be understood as a direct reflection of having embraced that voice.
“You see that hatred for himself, for his community, actually spill out. And you see how that can underpin a lot of his drive to supposedly represent or rescue his community is this idea that they’re broken in some way,” says Ahmed.
In doing so, Ahmed is reflecting not only on his work, but also on his public activism. It is an uncomfortable critique – that even his most noble pursuits may have been shaped, in part, by internalised prejudice. But, for Ahmed, that confrontation appears necessary if he wants to keep growing, and to serve his community more honestly.
Now, it seems that he's holding himself to the same rule he created in the writing room. If it seems scary and true, he's going to say it.
It is no coincidence, then, that Ahmed has become more open about the forces that have tried to shape him from the outside. He recently spoke about the many times intelligence agencies attempted to recruit him, aware of how easily a public platform like his could be co-opted, scrutinised or turned into something other than his own.
From here on, Ahmed seems intent on being unapologetically himself – as specific, conflicted and messy as that may be. That, the series suggests, is the only way to avoid becoming the caricature that others might want to turn him into.
“I’m trying to embrace the specificity of who I am,” he says. “It feels both exposing but also celebratory,” he says. “I guess this character is going on a journey of self-love; I guess it’s been one of those for me as well.”
