Riz Ahmed On The Very Personal ‘Bait’

“I’m here, I’m present”. A tired Riz Ahmed plops into my Zoom frame, kneading his face in his hands. Just the night before, he’s attended the premiere of his new show Bait. Now, amid rave reviews, he’s knee deep into back-to-back press junkets.

I begin by admitting that I binged Bait all in one sitting. “At no point could I tell where the show was going,” I tell him. Suddenly, the exhaustion flees his face in slow motion as he punches the air in triumph. “YES!”

This interview contains spoilers for Bait.

Riz Ahmed’s Bait Is Impossible to Categorise — On Purpose

The show, which Ahmed created, wrote, and stars in, follows Shah Latif, a struggling British Pakistani actor who fumbles a James Bond audition, and then accidentally-on-purpose ends up in the tabloids as the frontrunner for the role.

What begins as a comedy of mounting humiliations becomes something considerably stranger and more layered: a paranoid thriller, a family drama, a meditation on what it costs to perform a version of yourself palatable enough for the world to accept.

It careens across genres so deliberately that early reactions couldn’t decide what it was. Ahmed takes that as a compliment.

“You gotta keep people guessing,” he says. “Audiences are so intelligent now. You just got to keep people guessing.”

The show arrives into a franchise landscape that has shifted considerably since Bait was first conceived. In March 2025, Amazon MGM Studios formally closed its joint venture deal with veteran Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, assuming creative control of 007 after six decades of Broccoli family stewardship.

Ahmed developed Bait right around this period of uncertainty about what Bond was, who owned him, and what he was allowed to mean, and he needed Broccoli’s permission to use the IP at a moment when her grip on it was loosening.

By his account, everyone around him believed she would never grant it. He asked anyway, making the case that this isn’t really a Bond show at all, that Bond functions here as a symbol of aspiration and a particular flavour of Western male desirability, neither of which have anything to do with Shah and everything to do with what Shah has been told he should want.

She gave her blessing (on the condition that she was never mentioned in the show), and the deal was done over one lunch.

The personal stakes, though, took considerably longer to negotiate — mostly with himself.

How Riz Ahmed Turned Years of Personal Notes Into a James Bond Story

Ahmed has been filling a notepad for the better part of a decade, not with plot points exactly, but with observations about a particular feeling: that life can feel like a continuous audition, the gap between the self you perform in public and the self you actually are, and the specific, cumulative toll of maintaining that gap for a brown man in Britain, where the stakes of being perceived correctly feel higher and the margin for error feels narrower.

“Constantly having to perform this public version of ourselves,” he says, “and it’s usually at odds with who we really are or how we really feel.”

This is territory the Oscar-winner has mapped in other forms — his 2016 essay “Typecast as a Terrorist,” published in The Guardian as an extract from The Good Immigrant essay anthology, drew on the same bruising intersection of audition rooms and airport interrogation rooms — but Bait goes somewhere more uncomfortably interior.

“Being brown in the West can feel like you’re in a spy thriller,” he says. “You’re already in a spy thriller. What are you auditioning for? You have it whether you like it or not.”

“And more often than not, we don’t like it.”

I tell him I also make videos about the war — the one dominating every headlines app on every phone right now, in all its daily, grinding horror — and that the first five minutes made me belly laugh in a way I didn’t fully realize I needed until it escaped me.

Ahmed nods emphatically. “We all need to laugh right now,” he says. “We need to rediscover joy.”

“Laughter bypasses your brain and your biases and all these binaries that we’re trapped in. It can be so healing.”

Ahmed has very outspoken about global conflict himself, calling Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza ‘morally indefensible war crimes’ in 2023 and signing the Film Workers for Palestine boycott pledge in 2025. So when he talks about needing to rediscover joy, I know he isn’t speaking in abstractions.

“If there’s one thing that people take from this show,” he continues, “let it be those laughs.”

Riz Ahmed on Embarrassing Auditions, Defying Genre, and Convincing Himself

The show’s insistence on defying category (comedy! thriller! family drama! deceased talking animals!) was apparently not a straightforward sell at various stages of development, and Ahmed describes a process of constant persuasion, not just of financiers and collaborators but of himself.

Ahmed wanted Bait in cinemas at the same time as his take on Hamlet, both things existing simultaneously, on purpose, as a statement about what he is and what he refuses to be pinned down as.

“You always have to convince people,” he says. “Even convince yourself you know what you’re doing when you don’t.”

What he also knows intimately is the unglamorous texture of auditioning. “Every audition is embarassing,” he laughs.

He describes sending fourteen tapes to a Star Wars director after being given an email address “I probably should not have been given”, and accidentally tearing a hole in Danny Boyle’s shirt during a rather miscalculated audition for Slumdog Millionaire.

For most others, he says, they were so bad he still can’t bring himself to follow up.

“Auditioning is by very nature uncomfortable because it makes you self-conscious,” he says, “and the best work, the greatest flow that we feel in any kind of life, is the opposite of that.”

Riz Ahmed on the Bait Cast: Guz Khan, Rafe Spall, and a Reality Show Nobody Knew About

The rather excellent cast of Bait (put together by the indomitable Shaheen Baig) is a loving, Adam-Sandler-esque assembly of people Ahmed has wanted to be in a room with again.

Ahmed met Guz Khan, who plays his cousin Zulfi, nearly 20 years ago at Coventry University, where Khan was a student and Ahmed showed up asking him to come support a performance at the student union. Their “second first meeting” came years later when Khan went viral for a tweet about Jurassic Park and DM’d Ahmed on Twitter asking for career guidance, including whether fame required participating in any Illuminati initiations.

Sheeba Chaddha, who also stars across Ahmed in Hamlet, plays the family matriarch Tahira, and Ritu Arya is Yasmin, an ex who writes a provocative article questioning whether James Bond is even worthy of a Muslim man. Patrick Stewart voices a pig’s head. I will not be explaining further.

And then there is Rafe Spall, whose connection to Ahmed goes back to 2006, when the two of them — alongside Tom Hardy, in a pairing that becomes more cosmically implausible the longer you think about it — appeared together on a reality show called The Play’s the Thing, in which writers workshopped stage plays for the West End and actors were brought in to help. He mentions this and I make a noise that is not entirely dignified.

“In that reality show,” he adds, grinning, “Rafe played an airport security agent.”

His life away from set is family-oriented and, by his own description, low-key, so projects like this are among the few occasions he gets to spend sustained time with people he loves, he tells me. “I believe that comedy is about chemistry,” he says, “and you bring out the best of yourself when you’re around people you feel you can trust.”

The Real Events Behind Bait: What Riz Ahmed Drew From His Own Life

The degree to which Ahmed has chosen to be genuinely exposed in Bait is the most striking thing about both the show and this conversation.

For you see, a large proportion of the details woven into Shah’s story are not metaphorical approximations; they are, in several cases, the actual events.

He describes a panic attack he had at Kentish Town Forum, on the same stage where his character has a panic attack in the show, bursting out of that same side exit into that same alley. A memory of being attacked in a park behind his parents’ house in Wembley becomes his character’s memory too, filmed in that exact staircase, on that exact split of ground.

And then, more surprisingly: the security services. As he’s become more prominent, Ahmed tells me British agencies have reached out to him multiple times over the last several years, asking to meet, asking if he would work with them, asking, in so many words, whether he would spy for them. It happened to him, and so it happens to Shah.

Even the show’s setting across various London neighbourhoods — from popular landmarks like South Kensington to slightly more local-specific areas like Kentish Town — was very intentional.

“I wanted to take our day-to-day experience,” he says, “and elevate it to the epic grandeur and importance of what you see in spy thrillers.” The chase sequences feel like Bond but unfold across neighbourhood borders that carry specific, loaded meaning for the people crossing them, and the paranoia doesn’t require a single identifiable villain because the system doing the surveilling has already been built into the architecture of daily life.

He invokes Jordan Peele’s framing of Get Out — that being Black in America can feel like being in a horror movie, which is why the horror movie got made — and the parallel he draws to Bait is precise: the genre isn’t a metaphor for the experience, he’s suggesting; the experience is what the genre was always, somewhat imperfectly, describing.

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He also tells me about a watch given to him as a prize for one of his early films, which he Googled upon receiving and discovered was worth £2500, against the roughly £800 he had made on the production itself.

“For years I didn’t dare take it out of the box, because I thought one day, I’ll have to sell this” he says. “I’m in an unstable profession. I’ve got my dad’s voice in my head.”

He takes a beat. “The first time I wore the watch that I won in 2007 or 2008, was last year. Only after I made the show.”

There is something almost unbearably human about that image, the watch in the box, the decade and a half of telling himself he hadn’t yet earned the right to wear it, the particular psychic weight of growing up in a household where self-employment means uncertainty means you hold onto things because one day you might need to sell them. It is also, in its own way, the whole show — the thing you’ve been given that you’re too afraid to claim.

“As actors, we’re very encouraged to create mystique and try to be a blank canvas, so I used to think acting was about putting on a mask,” he says. “Now I think it’s about taking it off.”

“I think it’s about being specific enough about your truth that anyone can find themselves in it.”

‘Bait’, created, written by and starring Riz Ahmed, is streaming now on Prime Video.