‘The Night Of’ Star Riz Ahmed Talks Spending Half His Career on the HBO Series, James Gandolfini, and His Newest Rap Release
Riz Ahmed and John Turturro in The Night Of. (Photo: HBO)
Warning: This interview contains spoilers for The Night Of.
He’s got big things ahead for the rest of the year — a role in the upcoming Jason Bourne movie, as well as playing Rebel pilot Bodhi Rook in December’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — but right now it’s all about The Night Of for British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed. The London-based star portrays Naz Khan in the fantastic HBO crime series, in which John Turturro plays John Stone, an underdog attorney who tries to help Khan when he’s accused of a murder he doesn’t seem to be responsible for.
The twist-filled drama has been a part of Ahmed’s life for nearly half his career, with an initial pilot that shot in 2012 and starred James Gandolfini as Stone. It was The Sopranos star’s passion project, and Ahmed talked to Yahoo TV about his brief, but memorable experience with Gandolfini, about preparing to tackle the part of Khan and the multilayered storyline in The Night Of, and about his thriving rap career. (In case you didn’t know, Ahmed is also known as MC Riz in the U.K.)
Yahoo TV: You filmed the original pilot for The Night Of all the way back in 2012, and you’ve since co-starred in Nightcrawler, filmed the upcoming Jason Bourne movie, and you’re working on Rogue One. How does it feel to finally have people see this project?
Riz Ahmed: It’s quite surreal, because we did begin it a long time ago, and it’s been a very consistent feature of my life over the last four to five years, and I’ve only been acting for about 10 years, so that’s almost half of my professional career. [The project has] been somewhere swirling around in the background or [we’ve been] actively filming it, and it’s certainly the longest shoot I’ve ever done, taking place over eight months. In a way, it feels weird because the whole process started so long ago, but even weirder is the idea of kind of coming to the end of this project that has just been a consistent feature of my life for so long.
You shot the original pilot with James Gandolfini. There isn’t a lot of shared screen time between Naz and John in the first episode, but what was your experience working with him for that short time?
As you said, it was very brief, but I found it really interesting, just watching him on the set, seeing how loose and generous and kind of playful he was, as an actor, and also just as a kind of presence on set. The way he would, for example, lay out treats and food for all of the crew on the days that he’d be working. I just got this sense of him being a real kind of man of the people, and a really approachable, warm kind of guy. Obviously, he’s one of the greats. I think that’s how he’ll be remembered, and I think the performance he gave in The Sopranos — it’s one of the all-time great performances. It’s hard to think of anyone else who’s been as consistently brilliant over such a long period of time as he is in that series. His passing was a loss to all of us. I hope that we’ve mounted a project that he’d be pleased with.
I think anytime a crime story turns out as great as this one does, it’s because it has tackled a lot of different issues — the justice system and how precarious it is to navigate that, the racial issues, the cultural differences, the motivations behind what people are willing to do for each other, money, so many things. What most resonated with you from the script when you read it? What most made you want to sign on to do it?
You know, you put it brilliantly in talking about how multilayered the story is, and it really is the confluence of all those elements that sets it apart, because it’s not just that it’s a combination of these — an examination of the criminal justice system and race and money and the prison system — it’s that it deals with all those things and does them all really authentically and yet without shoving it down your throat. Ultimately, what propels the story forward is the story itself. Even though it takes a kind of wide look at lots of different aspects of the case, you never feel taken out of it, in the sense that you’re being given a God’s-eye view. You’re very much there with the characters. I think that in itself — the combination of all those things done so faithfully and in such detail and such uncompromising authenticity — is what made it stand out for me. It’s the quality of the writing that gets it ultimately. You’re dealing with two of the greats in Steve Zaillian and Richard Price.
Photo: HBO
Naz is a very quiet person. He’s very observant, always listening and paying attention to what’s going on. Even when we see him in a panic, even when he’s in the middle of chaos, he’s very quiet. That particular aspect of the character serves the story well throughout, especially when there are some twists and turns in the later episodes. Was that a specific choice you made at the beginning, to play him that way?
I think the writing does a lot of the work for you in something of this caliber. And not just that it’s very descriptive in telling you how to play things, but also it’s very instructive in what it doesn’t tell you, where it leaves things open … where you give a one-word answer to a very complex question, that in itself says something, and it tells you something. I guess it was just my interpretation of the different clues that the script offered, but really Naz is, in a way, someone who is used to being on the sidelines. I think the first or second shot we ever see of him is watching a basketball game from the sidelines, and he wants to get up, he wants to be involved, he wants to be part of the game, but the position he’s been used to occupying is one from the sidelines. I guess for me, how much he speaks or not, or how quiet he is, those are observations that you as a viewer might make of the character, but for me it’s playing the character as a guy trying to see the world. Playing Naz is more about what was going on internally, and the real whirlwind of things going on within him.
I guess that’s a really clumsy way of saying I try not to make too many decisions about how I’m going to play a character. I try to just see a situation as they might see it and see what flows from that. I think if you’ve got a great script, things fall into place with that kind of approach, if you just take a leap into the dark like that. You’ll find some kind of consistency if you can trust the script and jump.
What was the toughest mindset for you to get into as Naz? When we meet him, we see him as a very naive young guy, and he evolves throughout the series. We find out a lot of things about him. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say we know he spends some time in jail, and you talked to some inmates at Rikers Island to prepare for the role.
As you say, it’s tricky talking about this stuff without giving too much away or giving people an inkling of how long Naz is in jail or what happens to him or how he’s forced to change due to circumstances, but I guess I would say that when you’re playing a character like this, or you’re in a situation like this, they’re very extreme circumstances, and they’re not necessarily things that you can draw on experience in order to play. The way I try to handle that is, as you referred to, interviewing people, conducting hours of interviews and recordings, which I can then listen back to to tap into everything, from the feeling behind the story they’re telling, or even the intonation of their voice, and sometimes for accent work. I think in a way it’s finding a rhythm that can be tricky, and as you start to find a flow, things will take care of themselves a little more. Ultimately, I think it’s the beginning of a shoot that’s always trickiest, regardless in a way if it’s the start of a story or the end of a story. Finding your feet in a character is trickiest.
Related: ‘The Night Of’ Review: A Juicy, Riveting New Crime Drama
Did you find the experience of meeting the inmates at Rikers, or just being at Rikers in general, to be eye-opening?
Certainly, it was eye-opening. Certainly, going to visit Rikers and just seeing the kind of racial imbalance of the prison population there, not only of the inmates but also the correction officers. It’s completely stark and populated by people of color, and that’s something that’s just very visually stark. You just can’t deny it when you go and see that. It’s an image that stays with you. Ultimately that does tell us certain things about society and our criminal justice system. Also, just speaking to individuals, hearing about their lives, hearing about their experiences in jail, how they’re kind of forced to leave their old lives behind and their old sense of who they were behind — that’s something that definitely stayed with me. I guess it was kind of that big picture, both the big picture and those intimate kinds of conversations, that definitely stayed with me. And I felt a great sense of, almost kind of a responsibility, to those people who were so nice to open up their hearts and tell their stories to me.
What did you find ultimately to be the most interesting thing about Naz?
I think he’s a survivor. I think he has to be, as someone from a working class, migrant background. That is a quintessential American story, and it’s about survival and fighting for your dreams when the odds are stacked up against you, and I think there’s something deeply admirable about that attitude and about that kind of story. That’s something that I really kind of also identified with on a personal level and something I really admired in him.
There were certain things that are maybe trickier in the U.S.: being able to save up the money to go to university or access health care, which is sometimes a bit harder for people of working class backgrounds in the States than maybe it is in Europe, where there’s more of a welfare state or university education is subsidized. So meeting people with stories similar to Naz’s, where you have to be working, take time out from your studies to save enough money to go back to school — what’s not to admire there? It’s just working hard against the odds to make your dreams come true, and as his situation changes, as he finds himself in jail, I think in a way that same kind of scrappy survivalism remains in him. It just has to be focused on a different goal.
Viewers who know you from The Night Of or Nightcrawler maybe don’t know yet that you are also a rapper. What’s the inspiration behind your new video, “Englistan”?
I think we’re living in a time right now where due to the wake of the financial crash and the rising inequality, a lot of people are turning on each other, in multicultural societies, Latin America and in Europe. And for me, it’s something that’s very worrying. It’s reminiscent of the 1930s, where you had a lot of inequality, a financial crash, the rise of the far left and the far right and the scapegoating of minorities. So really I just wanted to put forward a music video — it’s called “Englistan,” which is just Urdu or Hindi or Punjabi for England — that pushes back against that sentiment, tries to celebrate multiculturalism, tries to celebrate not just everything we have in common, but also our differences, which is what I think makes us a culturally rich and also economically rich society.
We filmed in a synagogue that’s the oldest active synagogue in Western Europe, in East London, but the thing that’s interesting about that synagogue is it actually used to be a French Protestant church that was founded by French Protestant refugees coming to England because they were persecuted refugees in France in the 1700s. It used to be a church founded by French Protestant refugees, and it’s a stone throw from East London Mosque, which is one of the biggest mosques in Europe, and for me that’s a beautiful thing. That’s something to be celebrated. I think we’re seeing the rise of political forces that would try and divide us. I think it’s sad. For me, just on a personal level, I wanted to talk about, write my own love letter to, multiculturalism and to my experience of it.
That’s what the whole mix tape is, the “Englistan” mix tape, which is quite personal in many ways. John Turturro actually called me up when he heard it and said [doing a perfect impersonation of Turturro’s voice], “You know, I’m Italian-American, but I can really relate to the stuff you’re talking about. I get it. You know, I get it. It was like that for us too, growing up, in a different way.” The more specific you are about your experience, the more universal it becomes … I think that’s a lesson in a way.
The Night Of airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.