Riz Ahmed, the actor who turned the Bond question into his own show

Riz Ahmed

Photo: Red Carpet Report on Mingle Media TV from Culver City, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 1, 1982 Wembley, London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor, rapper and screenwriter
Known for	Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Nightcrawler, Venom
Awards	Emmy · Academy Award · MTV Video Music Award · British Independent Film · British Independent Film Awards Richard Harris

Riz Ahmed’s first film took him to the Berlin Film Festival and, on the way home, into a room at Luton Airport, where by his own account police asked him whether he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. His most personal work since is a comedy about a British Pakistani actor from west London who hears he is in the running to play James Bond and then watches his life come apart over four days. Between those two rooms runs the argument of his whole career: the part an industry writes for you can be taken over from the inside, and the taking over is the job. Bait, the Prime Video series he created, wrote and stars in, is where that argument stops being subtext and becomes the plot.

The family story begins in Karachi, which his parents left for England years before he was born. Rizwan Ahmed grew up in Wembley, in north-west London, the son of a shipping broker. A scholarship took him to Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood, and from there to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Oxford nearly lost him. He found the place isolating, and instead of leaving he started throwing club nights for everyone who did not fit its black-tie culture. Acting came afterwards, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; the rapping had started years earlier, on pirate radio and in freestyle battles.

The debut was Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantánamo, in which he played Shafiq Rasul, one of the Tipton Three. The film won a Silver Bear in Berlin, and then came Luton. He answered with a satirical track, “Post 9/11 Blues”, released as Riz MC on his own label after British radio initially kept it off the air as too politically sensitive.

The British films that followed look, on paper, like the obvious casting for a young Muslim actor. In practice he kept tilting them. He led Eran Creevy’s Shifty as a charismatic small-time dealer, played one of the hopeless would-be bombers in Chris Morris’s Four Lions, a satire that played the plot for farce, and took the lead in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, from Mohsin Hamid’s novel.

Hollywood arrived through Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler in 2014. Gilroy told him he was wrong for Rick, the desperate assistant to Jake Gyllenhaal‘s crime cameraman, and changed his mind within the first minute of the audition tape. Two years later came the run that changed his market value: the defecting Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and HBO’s The Night Of, which he carried as Nasir “Naz” Khan, a Pakistani-American student from Queens accused of murder. That performance won him the Emmy for lead actor in a limited series in 2017, the first for an Asian or Muslim actor in the category. For a moment he also sat at number one on the Billboard 200, through “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” on The Hamilton Mixtape, while Rogue One led the box office.

The studio years produced Venom, with Ahmed as the tech magnate Carlton Drake, and then the role that changed the conversation. In Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal he plays Ruben, a metal drummer losing his hearing, and the Best Actor nomination made him the first Muslim actor shortlisted in that Oscar category. By then he was moving towards authorship through his company, Left Handed Films. He co-wrote Mogul Mowgli with its director, Bassam Tariq, playing a British Pakistani rapper struck down by illness on the eve of his big tour, and won the best debut screenwriter prize at the British Independent Film Awards. His album The Long Goodbye spun off a short film of the same name, directed by Aneil Karia, which won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2022.

There is a catch in all of this, and Ahmed knows it better than his admirers. A speech he gave at the House of Commons in 2017 about representation led two researchers to devise the Riz Test, a checklist for how screen stories portray Muslim characters, so his name now works as a measuring stick for other people’s films. His own projects, meanwhile, have turned steadily inward: Mogul Mowgli, The Long Goodbye and Bait all orbit a British Pakistani artist who looks a lot like him. When the material holds, the result is ferocious. When it does not, critics notice. His long-gestating Hamlet, which Karia set among a wealthy South Asian family in contemporary London, split reviewers: Variety called it an adaptation with no reason to be, while Screen praised the force of his performance. Variety also judged Bait too high-concept.

That is what makes Bait worth taking seriously as a statement rather than a gimmick. Released in March 2026 after a premiere at Sundance, the six-episode series follows Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose Bond screen test becomes public, as his family and his former girlfriend weigh in on whether he deserves the tuxedo. Guz Khan, Ritu Arya and Sheeba Chaddha surround him, and Patrick Stewart voices a severed pig’s head that speaks the hero’s self-doubt aloud. Ahmed built it on something a friend once told him, that the distance between your public and private self is the amount of shame you carry. “Everyone has an audition for Bond,” he said while promoting it. “This is my audition for Bond.” The show earned him a second Emmy nomination as lead actor; Matthew Rhys took the award in September.

The rest of the recent work pulls in other directions. He played Prince Farouk in Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme, voiced Severus Snape in Audible’s full-cast Harry Potter audiobooks, and since 2 October he has been in cinemas opposite Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, as Dr. Nirav Ganesh, the environmental safety chief who keeps warning an oil tycoon about the disaster he has set loose. The film has divided critics; Ahmed’s performance has drawn some of its warmest notices.

Ahmed, who was born in Wembley on 1 December 1982, has been married since 2020 to the American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of A Place for Us, and in 2025 he revealed that they had become parents. He has raised money for refugee children and wrote about being profiled at airports and auditions in the essay collection The Good Immigrant.

Next is The Big Fix, a Netflix thriller directed by Baltasar Kormákur, filmed in Sydney and Malaysia during 2026, in which he stars alongside Mark Wahlberg in the story of a match-fixing network uncovered from inside FIFA. Whoever ends up wearing the tuxedo, Ahmed has already shot his screen test, and it runs six episodes.

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Tags: actors, Tom Cruise, Digger, Riz Ahmed, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Bait

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