How Riz Ahmed became the internet’s smartest crush
The year is 2010, and in the middle of peak autumn festivities in my hometown of Kolkata, my best friend tells me about her newest crush. To my surprise, he isn’t someone she stumbled upon at a Durga Pujo pandal, like every other year. It’s a young indie actor called Riz Ahmed from a film I’ve never heard of: Four Lions (2010). She had discovered the movie—and Ahmed—on a 4chan stroll, the OG Reddit for millennials, and watched it first thing the next morning. And now, I had to do the same. So I did.
For someone who loved the ridiculous Ali Zafar–starrer Tere Bin Laden, which had released just months prior, this cleverly crafted British mockumentary felt like its sublimely absurd companion piece. Four doltish Muslim men in the UK with jihadist dreams are led by Ahmed’s Omar, a security guard, family man and the most intellectually capable of the cell, which isn’t saying much. Omar had to be funny, human and petrifying all at once, but without tipping into caricature. Ahmed, only 28 at the time, performed this delicate dance with such sincerity that it became an unlikely vehicle for launching his international career as an actor who could make even the most reprehensible of men look endearing.
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His filmography that followed was a congeries of serious movies, TV series and music videos by Riz MC, Ahmed’s hip-hop alter ego. There was Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), where he played the Pakistani whiz-kid-turned-professor Changez Khan, manoeuvring an identity crisis that emerged in post 9/11 America. In Nightcrawler (2014), a film about a sociopathic freelance crime journalist who sells lurid footage to a local TV news station in LA, he plays Rick, the desperate, underpaid assistant who gradually realises he is trapped in a relationship more dangerous than any crime scene they film. The HBO miniseries The Night Of (2016) is a seemingly straightforward murder mystery seen through the eyes of a Pakistani-American college kid played by Ahmed, who is accused of a crime he may or may not have committed.
Although the bulk of his roles were hard-hitting, every now and then, Ahmed would sneak in a biting but droll commentary on Islamophobia, especially through his music as part of the hip-hop trio, Swet Shop Boys. Guest-starring as the sweet but dim-witted surfing instructor Paul-Louis in Girls, Lena Dunham’s cult cringe comedy, Ahmed added his laid-back charm to a cocktail of deadpan confidence and kooky philosophies, delivered through eccentric wellness jargon that he somehow made believable.
