Riz Ahmed Talks ‘Bait’, Shame And Authenticity

In Riz Ahmed‘s Prime Video show Bait, he plays Shah Latif, a struggling actor who accidentally goes viral as the suspected new James Bond. As Shah tries to manage the reactions of his family and friends, the show takes him on a odyssey through both London and his own psyche.

“He’s always trying to perform a version of himself that’ll be more accepted, desired, validated, I felt like that sometimes, not just as an actor, but as a human being,” Ahmed said during an interview at the Deadline Studio at Prime Experience. “I think that that’s a feeling we can all relate to. We’re all performing this public version of ourselves on social media or on Zoom or on LinkedIn or whatever it is, even when we meet strangers. But actually we are all so much more messy, chaotic, and vulnerable than that.”

Ahmed was joined on the panel by executive producer Allie Moore, Ahmed’s co-showrunner Ben Karlin, director Bassam Tariq and music supervisor Ciara Elwis. Check out the conversation in the video below and scroll down for photos from the event.

As Shah finds himself facing his own confusion and battles for self-worth and identity, Ahmed said he had kept in mind something a friend had once said: “He told me that the distance between your public and private self is the amount of shame that you carry. He’s no longer my friend anymore because that was too real for me,” he deadpanned, “but I wanted to make a comedy within that playground of shame. The only way through shame is laughter, I think. And it’s like I wanted to just put it all out there about how sometimes I feel like an imposter. I think we all do. And so James Bond in this show is a kind of symbol of what you wish you were and everything that actually you’re not.”

Moore added, “We talked a lot about in the early days of the show that it was about the cost of success and a character hasn’t even had the success he wants yet and still the cost of that, and how that plays out within your own family and friend groups and personal relationships. So I think it was tackling things within the entertainment industry, but also going a step further, looking at how we’re all complicit in the desire for success and ambition.”

In addition to co-showrunner duties, Karlin (Modern Family, The Colbert Report) also serves as executive producer and writer on the show.

“I didn’t know Riz personally,” Karlin said, “I just knew him from his work. But obviously when I was presented with the opportunity to work with him, I jumped at it. He had a ton of ideas and it was just like an exercise in harnessing this madcap energy. And it was really, really fun talking about these ideas and these themes, but having this character that we knew was going to be able to bring humanity to it all… A guy who typically wouldn’t get a chance to play Bond is up for Bond and how do people react? I think there’s like a first-level reaction to that kind of story.”

Ahmed also emphasized the value of the show’s music, giving credit to music supervisor Ciara Elwis, who said, “I think in episode 4, we have everything from UK grime to garage to ’70s Pakistani folk music all in one episode. And it’s that idea of life doesn’t take place in one genre, it takes place in lots of different genres. And that episode specifically takes place on Brick Lane [in London]. You can go to Brick Lane any night of the week and you’ll hear all that music. So it’s that thing of truth being stranger than fiction.”

Ahmed noted that director Bassam Tariq brought a valuable perspective to the show, given that he’s not from London.

Tariq said, “There’s something about Shah that’s really larger than life. I think what we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that we framed everything really wide in the beginning. So many things are always competing in his world, so how do we just always show it coming in?”

He also focused in on the vibrancy of the city and its people. “I think the people are really beautiful,” he said. “I think that’s the one thing that we wanted to make sure that all the colors are alive. From the costumes that we had from our costume designer, Jodi-Simone [Howe] and just making sure that all the colors are there. So I think we made sure that we were never just stuck in the usual grays that I think we imagine London to be.”

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