Losing control with Riz Ahmed

HERE IS A PARTIAL INVENTORY Riz Ahmed’s projects for his breakthrough in 2016:

– Two TV shows, “The Night Of” and “The OA”;
– Four feature films, including the blockbusters “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “Jason Bourne”;
– An essay contributed to the bestselling book “The Good Immigrant”;
– And two major musical moments, an appearance on the mixtape “Hamilton” and the album “Cashmere”, released by Ahmed and rapper Heems as part of their hip-hop duo Swet Shop Boys.

It was a lot, for better or for worse. In December of that year, Ahmed took to Instagram for a flashback that seemed more than a little worn out. “Only a year ago, for various reasons, I wasn’t sure I could continue doing this,” he wrote. “I realized through some really tough times that we have no control in this life. And it brought me down, but then, seeing no other way forward, I had to come to terms with this helplessness.

On Zoom four years later, I read the caption to Ahmed, who blinked twice. “When did I write this? ” he said. “I have no recollection of this. Sensational. Sensational. I had a bit of burnout.

Ahmed has always been eager to stack his plate. “Like Ruben, I rely a lot on being obsessively busy,” he said. A successful acting career practically requires a traveling lifestyle and this came naturally to Ahmed, who grew up in Wembley, London, with a father who worked for the Pakistani Merchant Navy: “He was often away from home, so maybe I ‘I’ve internalized this idea that what you’re supposed to do as a working man is get out of the house and cover as much ground as you can in the world.

Or maybe, Ahmed thought, a child of immigrants will always have an innate sense of the urge to travel. “There’s a constant tale of home being somewhere else, home is the next place you go,” he says. “But if home is always the next place, then you’re building a tent on quicksand. Perhaps the work itself is where you can live.

So he lived there, working steadily and then heavily, and thus becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian man to win an acting Emmy for his transformative role as an accused murderer in “The Night Of”. But around this time, after being dragged in so many different directions, Ahmed started to lose his center. Worse still, the creative spirit that animates him had come to feel less like a wild creature than a circus animal.