Riz Ahmed

I want to get ready for these soliloquies.

And what would happen is me and Anil would turn up on set on like two hours sleep, one hour sleep, like 45 minutes sleep.

And the baby was a newborn.

Exactly.

And his child was sleep regressing.

And what I realized after the first I was just like, well, this is all just going to be a total failure now.

And then I realized that, hang on a minute, is exactly how Hamlet feels.

The word that is repeated most frequently in To Be or Not To Be is the word sleep.

This guy is not sleeping.

He needs to sleep.

He hasn't slept.

He's unravelling from that as well.

And it actually infused a kind of very raw, kind of quite vulnerable, quite frazzled kind of...

Texture, I think, to my performance that I could never have planned or controlled.

You know, I think you can kind of feel a lot of that exhausted kind of disarray in the performance.

And honestly, that's the version of Hamlet I'm interested in is not the version...

who is the smartest guy in the room, spouting, commanding poetry.

The version of Hamlet I'm interested in is the most stressed, vulnerable and under pressure guy in the room, who continues to speak because the words are failing him.

He can't find the right words.

Yeah, very, very much so.