Riz Ahmed

speaker

1,209 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Riz Ahmed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Fresh Air · Riz Ahmed is chasing acceptance in 'Bait' · 23 Mar 2026 podcast

another pizza and it goes off and security like yeah this you look this person looked kind of shady and we get into a back and forth and i'm so frustrated at one point i go dude i'm not shoplifting i'm star wars man and they go okay this person is definitely crazy and uh you're banned you're never coming back here it's just an example about like the messy chaos of who we really are versus the image of success that's somewhere out there publicly and again

That's not just true for an actor.

That's true of everyone who's posting their best selfie on Instagram, you know?

So I started jotting down these little stories to try and just process them and make sense of them.

I knew there was something in these contradictions and juxtapositions that was about me making sense of my own experience.

Um, but also that just felt kind of universal if I could just get a handle on it.

And so I spent many years jotting down these, um, these ideas.

Um, and then it was when I met my co-showrunner, Ben Carlin, we put the writer's room together and all this kind of stuff.

We realized actually the perfect symbol, um,

um for this show is is James Bond and that was partly also because my name had been mentioned in relation to James Bond casting in some articles and and stuff over the years so in the meta kind of spirit of this show we're trying to be as meta as possible and um and have fun with that actually that's the perfect symbol you know it's a perfect symbol of for a character who wants to be anything other than himself who would he want to be he'd want to be James Bond

Yeah, well, you know, we don't really want to come up with any answers.

I have none, you know.

I really want to kind of like explore the different sides of the representation conversation in that moment, really, you know.

I think it's an important conversation.

I also think it has its limits.

I also think it's been weaponized and turned into an economy in some ways and a competitive race, you know, representation, merchantry.

And I think it also can sometimes be a distraction from real systemic change.

You know, the tokenism of window dressing can hide like bigger issues that lie beneath sometimes.

So I think there's an interesting kind of back and forth that they have there.

there's really kind of getting into some of that nitty gritty, but again, without answers, just trying to kind of put it all out there.

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