They’re casting James Bond right now. Are you paying attention to the casting conversation at all?
I have to be really honest—I haven’t been keeping the closest tabs on it. I think that these things work the best when we’re bold and reimagining and reinventing them. I hope whatever direction it goes next is a new one.
Bassam Tariq, the director of your film Mogul Mowgli (2021), directs half of Bait. Your mother on Bait, Sheeba Chaddha, also plays Gertrude in Hamlet. It seems like you’ve really made a concerted point to collaborate with people you’ve worked with in the past.
Building your chosen family, and building community, is one of the most difficult things to do in life. For something that felt so personal and so vulnerable, I needed people who trusted me and who I trusted. That means old friends like Guz Khan and collaborators like Sheeba Chaddha and people who are my brothers, like Bassam. Even my wife, Fatima Farheen Mirza, was in the writers room for this. Prashanth [Venkataramanujam] who works with Hasan Minhaj, who’s a buddy, was in there. But then also making lots of new friends in the process. I feel like your best work is when you are able to be vulnerable and there’s trust around there.
With Hamlet and Bait, you’ve centered the South Asian community in stories that typically star white people, and in Bait you interrogate why your character would even want to play a historically white character like James Bond. What do you think draws you to telling these stories?
I was always interested in this idea of stretching culture. To me, that’s about expanding the idea of who and what is considered human and relatable, who or what you watch and go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me too.’ How can we expand that circle of things that you feel that you see yourself in? I think that’s about taking these archetypal characters, expanding them, stretching them, allowing more people to find themselves in them, complicating and exploding these symbols wide open.
I also think these are two very different ways of hopefully doing the same thing. One is stepping literally inside Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s like, yes, it’s the first nonwhite Hamlet in cinema, in Shakespeare’s verse. But it’s Shakespeare’s play—it’s Hamlet—whereas Bait is hopefully something that is a new offering to the culture. I don’t know if we’ve had many Shah Latifs, or Latif families, in our culture and on our screens. Hopefully they’re both different ways of trying to do the same thing, which, I think, is the purpose of all art. How far can you go from yourself and still find yourself in it?
Riz Ahmed in Hamlet.Courtesy of TIFF.
