What lies beyond the fortress of identity and representation? This is a question I've long hoped to ask Riz Ahmed. It's 10am on a Monday and the Oscar-winning actor and rapper is dialling in from Los Angeles, California, where he's been based for six months. He has been working on a longstanding project-one, he shares, that has been close to his heart but is still under wraps. His voice is laced with the remnants of a busy week, yet he is characteristically affable and warm.
The past 15 years of Riz's career have been inundated with the weight of cultural portrayal. A look at his Rolodex will reveal as much. A graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama's acting programme, Riz's career kicked off with a role as Shafiq Rasul in Michael Winterbottom's docudrama film, The Road to Guantánamo. The plot? A tale of three young British men detained by the US after a visit to Afghanistan in 2001. What followed were roles both satirical and archetypal of his British-Pakistani heritage a rite of passage he describes as stages one and two of ethnic portrayals in film in the book, The Good Immigrant. For Riz, this looked like being cast as the aspiring suicide bomber Omar in Chris Morris's Four Lions and finance professor Changez Khan in Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Now, at 41 years old. Riz has reached a kind of nirvana, paved with the bricks he used to breach a notoriously homogeneous industry.
This story is from the Vogue Man Singapore - July/August 2024 edition of Vogue Singapore.
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This story is from the Vogue Man Singapore - July/August 2024 edition of Vogue Singapore.
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