The talent and the political activism of Riz Ahmed The actor and activist has just released his latest project, an LP and an anti-racist short film
These last 12 months have been the turning point for Riz Ahmed. He has just returned from the Berlin Film Festival, where he presented the film Mogul Mowgli, written and starring him, and in the meantime he also released an EP: The Long Goodbye, a breakup album that tells bitterly about his separation from England, addressing the issue of Brexit and denouncing the xenophobia that still survives among the British. The album has strong political content, contains some interludes by Mahershala Ali, Mindy Kaling and the activist Yara Shahidi and comes along with an anti-racist short film written by Ahmed himself. A real all-round art project.
For many, the English actor, author and musician, also seen sitting in the front-row of Prada's Menswear FW2020 show, is the star of The Night Of, the miniseries that won him the Emmy for Best Actor for a miniseries or TV movie in 2017, the first given to a Muslim actor. Others have seen it in the latest instalment of the Jason Bourne's saga, in Nightcrawler, as the villain in Venom and in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, others still remember him for the guest-star role in the last season of Lena Dunham's Girls – a role that earned him his second Emmy.
The goal of Riz Ahmed's commitment is, in short, to arrive at a time when he will not necessarily have to interpret a stereotype, but a role unrelated to his ethnicity:
There, my name might even be Dave […]. You are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens; you are a signifier before you are a person.
Despite the success, he has not yet achieved that goal. Today he will also be a star, but they still stop him at the airport. Not because people don't know who he is, but simply because it's hard to defeat an entire system. That's why he changed his perspective: it may not have been the auditions that taught him how to survive the airport checks, but it was the controls that taught him how to succeed at the hearings.
