HERE IS A PARTIAL INVENTORY of Riz Ahmed’s projects in his innovative year of 2016:
– Two television programs, “The Night Of” and “The OA”;
– Four feature films, including box office hits “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “Jason Bourne”;
– An essay contributed to the bestseller “The Good Immigrant”;
– And two great musical moments, a special participation in the mixtape of “Hamilton” and the album “Cashmere”, released by Ahmed and rapper Heems as part of their hip-hop duo Swet Shop Boys.
It was a lot, for good and for bad. In December of that year, Ahmed accessed Instagram for a celebratory retrospective that looked more than a little exhausted. “Just a year ago, for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t sure I could continue doing this,” he wrote. “I realized, in some really difficult moments, that we have no control in this life. And that discouraged me, but then, seeing no other way to go, I had to embrace that helplessness. “
At Zoom four years later, I read the caption to Ahmed, who blinked twice. “When I wrote This one? ” he said. “I have no memory of that. Wow. Wow. I had a certain breakdown. “
Ahmed always wanted to stack his plate. “Like Ruben, I have a lot of confidence in being obsessively busy,” he said. A successful acting career practically requires an itinerant lifestyle and that came naturally to Ahmed, who grew up in Wembley, London, with a father who worked for the Pakistani merchant navy: “He was a long way from home, so maybe I ‘I internalized this idea that what you should do as a worker is to leave the house and cover as much land as possible in the world. “
Or perhaps, thought Ahmed, a son of immigrants always has an innate sense of desire to travel. “There is a constant narrative that the house is somewhere else, the house is the next place you go,” he said. “But if home is always the next place, then you are building a quicksand tent. Work itself is the place where you can live, perhaps. “
So he lived there, working steadily, then heavily, and in the process becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian man to win an Emmy for his transformative role as an accused killer in “The Night Of”. But at that time, after being pulled in so many different directions, Ahmed started to lose his center. Worse, the creative spirit that animates him began to feel less like a wild creature and more like a circus animal.