Riz Ahmed is looking back being hospitalized while working on 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
In a new interview, the 42-year-old Oscar winner detailed his “intense” hospitalization that helped him connect with his character in Sound of Metal.
Keep reading to find out more…“Around the time of taking on Sound of Metal, I had a very intense health-related experience myself,” Riz shared on the Podcrushed podcast, referring to his 2019 movie in which he played a drummer who loses his hearing. “I had to grapple with the grief but also the acceptance around that.”
Riz went on to say he was “in the middle of filming” Rogue One when his body felt off.
“My body just, kind of, gave up on me,” he explained. “I was extremely exhausted, [and] I was hospitalized for a brief period. I just had to really try and retrain my strength. It was, like, building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually.”
Riz continued, “For a minute, I was, like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’ It really wasn’t clear. Something very silent and very intense had happened to me, and I wasn’t getting better quickly.”
While in the hospital, Riz said that he felt a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror.”
“[I also felt] a tremendous liberation and gratitude and acceptance,” he noted. “Someone told me that cancer patients, once they’ve recovered, say, ‘You know what? I’m so glad I’m better, but I wish I could bottle that slightly zen-like gratitude I had when I lost everything.’ I always think that when you’re brought to your knees, you’re halfway to praying.”
He added, “You’re humbled in that way when something is taken away from you, you become even more acutely aware of everything you have.”
He also said that “on a health level,” it was difficult not to have “control” over his body.
“You realize, like, you don’t control anything, man,” Riz reflected. “You don’t control a single thing. You don’t even control your body. Then, in moments of trippy clarity in the darkness, I realized [that] everything you have is a gift. .. In a strange way, I never felt more grateful, more at peace, more content than when I felt I was going to lose my whole life.”
After recovering from hospitalization, Riz read the script for Sound of Metal and knew immediately that he needed to be involved in the movie.
“I was like, ‘I need to tell this story. I need to tell a story for me [and] I need to make sense of this,’” he explained. “I think that’s one of the greatest privileges that we get as storytellers.”
In another recent interview, Riz Ahmed shared his interesting idea to revamp American politics.
