Riz Ahmed admits he’s still a London boy at heart: ‘I visit my parents every week’

He electrified in HBO’s The Night Of, stars in the last series of Girls and with Billie Piper in City of Tiny Lights
Rising star: Riz Ahmed stars opposite Billie Piper in City of Tiny Lights
Maarten de Boer/Getty Images
Ellen E. Jones4 April 2017
The Weekender

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There are many Londons, and Wembley-born Riz Ahmed has passed through most of them.

“Most British cities are a real mix of different kinds of people,” he says with a flash of the thoughtful intensity that defines his on-screen charisma.

“I don’t just mean different races, I mean different subcultures, different scenes. You’ve got the back alley, down-and-out world and you’ve got the posh, bottle-service clubs, you know?”

And then there are the tumbledown Brixton terraces where much of his new film City of Tiny Lights was shot; the multicultural melee celebrated on his 2016 Riz MC mixtape, Englistan; the Houses of Parliament, where he gave a speech last month, and the plush sofa of a Soho hotel, where we’re seated today to talk it over — all London, all arenas in which Riz Ahmed has, in the past decade, learned to feel at home.

City of Tiny Lights spans several of these cities-within-cities. Adapted from Patrick Neate’s 2005 novel, it tells the story of Tommy Akhtar (played by Ahmed), a private investigator who is employed by the mysterious Melody (The Good Wife’s Cush Jumbo) to look into a young woman’s disappearance.

Akhtar’s investigation embroils him in Islamic terrorism, shady property deals and high-end prostitution but also forces him to reconnect with his own past, a familiar haze of alco-pops in the park, boys with “curtains” and The Streets’ first album.

Last year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards Best Actress winner Billie Piper co-stars as Shelley, Akhtar’s childhood sweetheart, who resurfaces in his life just as things begin to get complicated.

Film noir references hang in the air almost as thickly as the cigarette smoke and Ahmed says that’s part of what attracted him: “We were talking about what would happen if you did a Wong Kar-wai film in Brixton, you know?

"Really embracing those nocturnal, melancholic, neon nightscapes.” He pauses for a moment: “I think there is that kind of bittersweetness in a city like London. There’s an old heartbreak on every corner.”

It’s a fittingly Chandler-esque line to describe a film that traces its style back to the Bogie and Bacall films of the 1940s.

Ahmed shows a particular flair for reinvigorating lines of double-edged dialogue with a fresh London lilt.

Does he, like Akhtar, typically walk into a newsagent and greet the shopkeeper with a cheery “Alright, boss”? “Standardly!” he laughs. “A lot of people call shopkeepers ‘boss’! And cab drivers call you ‘boss’, you call them ‘boss’… ‘Boss’ is very London.”

Londoner: Riz Ahmed feels at home in all of the city's arenas 

It’s been a while since 34-year-old Ahmed has been able to use his own accent or reflect on the essence of his hometown in the course of a job.

Recent gigs have included playing a timid murder suspect in the HBO hit The Night Of, Hannah’s surfer-dude lover in the current series of Girls, an imperial pilot-turned-rebel-fighter in Star Wars prequel Rogue One and a Zuckerberg-like tech guru alongside Matt Damon in the latest Jason Bourne instalment.

Each major role has come with its own round of US chat show appearances, magazine cover shoots and red-carpet engagements, yet long before Ahmed’s star rose he’d already built a body of challenging and respected work.

His debut in Michael Winterbottom’s docu-drama The Road to Guantánamo (2006) was followed up with micro-budget crime thriller Shifty (2008) and Chris Morris’s post-9/11 jihadist satire Four Lions (2010).

Ahmed has been an exciting talent for over a decade but the past 12 months have undoubtedly kicked it all up a gear.

While Ahmed’s name can broker meetings, close deals and open movies in Hollywood, the man himself remains steadfastly rooted in London.

He still visits his parents in Wembley every week, he says, which is more than most young Londoners manage. What do they make of his success?

“What my mum thinks about my success is: ‘Did you eat today?’ Literally. That’s what she thinks about anything. And my dad thinks it’s not too late to become a banker. Yeah…”

Comic turn: Riz Ahmed made a cameo alongside Lena Dunham in Girls 

He makes eye contact and smiles mischievously: “Maybe I need to take a leaf out of the book of your new editor?”

In fact, Ahmed needs no role model when it comes to either being politically engaged or managing a busy portfolio career.

His parliamentary speech on diversity and representation last month demonstrated a fearless interest in change-making, and 11 years after his rap track Post 9/11 Blues was briefly banned from British radio, he maintains a successful, critically acclaimed music career alongside his acting one.

Unfortunately, though, erstwhile pop poppet Piper probably won’t be among his upcoming musical collaborators: “Get her manager to return my calls! Do you know what I mean? I’ve been trying to get her to rap a 16-bar verse on the new Swet Shop Boys for a while now.”

Ahmed’s propensity to speak his mind has hardly stood in the way of his success, but has it ever occurred to him that if he practised a studied insipidity, as many actors do, he might be even more enthusiastically embraced by his industry?

He doesn’t see it that way. “I think you have no choice but to talk about your reality. I mean, our subjective experience is the only thing that we can offer to the collective conversation.

"So that’s all I’m doing. I’m doing the same thing as other actors who might come from a totally different background. They’re talking about their point of view based on their experiences.

"It’s just that certain people’s experiences are labelled ‘political’ because we’re just not used to hearing them.”

What is most striking about Ahmed’s way of talking is not any political agenda but the consistent effort he makes to imagine what the world might look like from a different perspective.

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This Olympic-standard imaginative empathy is what makes him a great actor, of course, but it also manifests in his conversation as unexpected analogies or redirected questions. “It’s the same with renewable energy,” he tells me, when describing his ideas on screen diversity.

“You need to incentivise innovation sometimes, because people are stuck in old habits, but long term, if you stick to those, they become a liability, they stop you from growing. It’s the same in any industry really.”

Is City of Tiny Lights his way of putting these principles into action? “As much as I’d like to think that one British indie film can change everything, I think it falls to everyone to make their contribution in their own way, whether it’s a journalist like yourself, bringing your own perspective, or whether it’s commissioners or MPs deciding to step in.”

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He is most animated when describing people: family members, old friends or colleagues he’s enjoyed working with.

If it’s someone he’s particularly fond of, like his The Night Of co-star and frequent Coen Brothers collaborator John Turturro, he’ll throw in an impressively accurate impression to boot.

Turturro is “the Brooklyn, Italian-American uncle I never had… He has a lot of wisdom to share and usually gets it across through metaphors about cooking, dancing or making love.”

Lena Dunham is “a phenomenon…she runs the set like a fairy godmother, just like giving everyone amazing vibes and making me crack up with her improv... I would work with her again in a heartbeat.”

So what if there was a scheduling conflict between a second series of The Night Of (possible) the next Star Wars instalment (rumoured) and Girls: The Movie (all-but-confirmed), which would he prioritise?

Ahmed gives the matter some consideration: “There’s got to be a way for Paul-Louis to travel between dimensions or something,” he says finally, slipping back into his Girls’ character’s beach-bum drawl.

“That’s what I think. I reckon if he gets stoned enough, he can kind of like pass through, like, an intergalactic porthole.”

City of Tiny Lights is released on Friday

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