Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Want to understand the reason and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's On The Media's specialty. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On The Media.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. A struggling British-Pakistani actor lands the audition of a lifetime as James Bond. Word gets out, and the internet goes wild. And suddenly, his life starts to resemble the very character he's auditioning to play. He's in a chase sequence, except he's not chasing a villain. He's chasing acceptance.
That's the setup for Bait, a new prime video series that is part spy thriller, part family comedy, part psychological unraveling, and entirely unlike anything else on television right now. My guest, Riz Ahmed, wrote, created it, produced it, and stars as the lead character, Shah Lateef. Bate opens with Shaw in a tuxedo, doing a James Bond screen test.
He's debonair, commanding, in control, James Bond personified. And then he forgets his lines.
Tell me, when it's just you all alone, how do you live with yourself?
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Riz Ahmed's series 'Bait'?
Do you even know who you are?
Line. Cut. Sorry. Sorry.
Sorry, Helen. It's all good. It's all good. It's just we're on a bit of a schedule. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Quick reset back to once I've made it this time. How are you blowing this audition? I know the speech. I know it. You f***ed up every time at the exact same moment. What is this, a prank show? You're wearing a hidden camera. It's funny. I just have a very particular process.
I've got my head around it now.
Chapter 3: How does Riz Ahmed relate his character to the concept of acceptance?
I'm ready. Sorry, guys. We have to... Yeah, well, just a minute. Sorry. How was your weekend? It was good, thanks. How was yours? Great. What did you do? Just... Thanks. Thanks, Jim. My second... Stop it. Sorry. You know what?
Chapter 4: What experiences influenced Riz Ahmed's creative process for 'Bait'?
They didn't want to see you. I had to convince them, so this is on me. I've got a confession to make. I'm light-headed from fasting. It's the holy Muslim month. It's called Ramadan. It involves no eating and drinking in the day. I'm light-headed from a bit of a cultural understanding. Well, I've just seen you drink apple juice six takes in a row. I tried.
This moment is the beginning of a wild ride as we watch this character unravel. And Riz has said, Riz is an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor who is known for many roles, including The Night Of. an HBO crime drama in which he plays a college student whose life shatters after being accused of murder. In Sound of Metal, he played a punk drummer grappling with sudden hearing loss.
And in The Long Goodbye, he's part of a British Pakistani family whose ordinary Sunday is shattered by a far-right militia. Riz Ahmed earned an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. This spring, his adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet opens in theaters. And Riz, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me back.
Well, after that failed screen test that we just heard in that clip, your character, Shaw, goes to the dressing room, and then he goes over the monologue he forgot during the audition, and then he starts berating himself in the mirror for failing that test.
I actually want to play that, and then I want to ask you something on the other side of it. Let's listen. You knew it. Hmm.
Do you know who you are?
I'll tell you who you are.
You're a failure.
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Chapter 5: How does Riz Ahmed connect his character to Shakespeare's Hamlet?
That's a big part of our show as well, that element. Bait in Urdu means your loyalty or your allegiance. And that is something that Shah is contending with. It's home versus ambition, east versus west. Bait in Arabic and Hebrew means home. And so much of this show is a love letter to home and it's about family and how far do you travel from home in order to please home or help home, you know.
And then, of course, there's a big spy thriller element to our show and bait is something that's used as part of a trap. And so it's that. So it's a weird thing where only in retrospect, we realize like, oh my God, we accidentally stumbled on the perfect title for this that actually communicates the entire layer cake of this show. It is all those flavors. And the word bait means all those things.
That's remarkable that you stumbled upon like knowing those meanings outside of the traditional meaning of bait. That wasn't when you all said, oh, yeah, let's come up with bait. Did you have all of those before you? No, no.
Do you know what? I often have to explain what the word bait means to American collaborators because I say it all the time. Often I'll come up with an idea, you know, a spitball in the writer's room and I'll go, what about this? Actually, that's too bait. That's a bit bait. I don't want it to be as bait as that. And they go, what do you mean? And I was like, oh, bait means like too blatant.
It's not subtle enough. And of course, that's British slang because the most important thing you have to be as a Brit is understated and subtle and, you know, reserved. And so bait is a kind of derogatory kind of slang term.
Sir Patrick Stewart, best known as Captain Picard in Star Trek, he appears in Bait in a role that I will not spoil except to say that it's not what you'd expect. And I wonder what does his presence do in the story that no one else could?
First of all, it elevates the story just by the fact that it's Patrick Stewart in this story. I mean, he's such a hero. You know, I don't want to say too much about the role he plays because it is very particular and I don't want to give anything away. I guess I'll just say that working with him showed me
that your, your art can kind of only be as big as your heart is, you know, if that doesn't sound too corny, like he, you kind of have to have a capacity for such receptivity, humility, generosity, um, and empathy in order to kind of be an artist of that stature. And at that level, it, you know, just the human, yeah, just, just the kindness, the openness at 84 to step into this story.
I remember having to explain, you know, various kinds of British slang and Urdu swear words to him, you know, and it was nothing but just always engaged, always interested, always, shall we do it again? Um, yeah, he was, he was just such a pro and such a gentleman. And, um, I'll really cherish that experience.
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Chapter 6: What themes of identity and representation are explored in 'Bait'?
And I didn't fully understand that until I myself became a father. until I became actually an absent father in the sense that I was away for much of the day, awake before my kid was awake, home after my kid had gone to sleep. And I started to understand that emotionally, but actually it was more the effect it had on me physically because... you know, I'm waiting to, I want to play this role.
It means so much to me, this story, like 15 years of developing the script. 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.
Because your baby was a newborn. Yeah.
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.
I mean, Shakespeare was a wordsmith. He's working in verse and rhythm. And I'm thinking about your background in rap and your politically charged album. And I'm wondering, did that hip hop instinct shape at all how you heard and delivered these lines?
Yeah, very, very much so. Very much so. Here's my take on it. A lot of people find a block with Shakespeare because they're find it difficult to understand what the words mean. I totally get it. I often feel the same way. Here's the thing. People in Shakespeare's day themselves did not speak like that. They didn't say that. Shakespeare made up like between three and five thousand new words.
I think there's some estimates. The word eyeball Is a word that he made up. Can you imagine hearing that for the first time? A what ball? An eye? What? He made that up. And one thing that he played with all the time was rhythm. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. And so in the same way that when I listen to... Some of my favorite rappers, new songs.
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