Riz Ahmed

And it's actually feeling kind of complicit in it and gaslit about it.

And that's what the play is about.

And I think that this is when it was meant to be told.

But for us creatively, the part that we were struggling to unlock is how do you not make this feel just like a Shakespeare performance and a poetry recital?

How do you not make this feel like a kind of self-congratulatory, like, actor wants to take on the classic?

And actually, that was the opposite of how we wanted it to feel.

And it really took us meeting Anil Kharia, the director.

It was after I collaborated with him on the short film, The Long Goodbye, for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, oh, I think we know how to do this.

We need a director who's worked a lot in rap music videos.

We need a director who has actually...

can render poetry in a very raw way and give us raw action in a very poetic way.

And that's what he did in that short film.

And that's what he does in his films.

And we connected and we had a long conversation about how this has to feel like music, you know?

Yeah, I don't think it's about suicide at all.

It's about...

fighting back against oppression, even if you know that you will lose everything, possibly even your life.

It's actually, it's very clear in black and white in the text, the active verb here is about taking, it's about to take up arms.

You know, what he's saying is there's two choices.

You can carry on being