One to watch...Rizwan Ahmed

Escaping Guantanamo
Stephen Armstrong - NEW STATESMAN
Published 18 October 2007
Riz Ahmed has played one of the Tipton Three and the brother of a suicide bomber. Now he'd really like a romantic role


Riz Ahmed is being very careful at the moment. He is young, good-looking and a fast-rising actor, appearing in scorching dramas about the problems British Muslims face in this fractured century. He stars in the award-winning writer-director Peter Kosminsky's drama Britz, which goes out on Channel 4 this month, and last year played one of the Tipton Three in Michael Winterbottom's Road to Guantanamo. Not only is he British, Muslim and extremely articulate, but he has found himself caught up in the vagaries of the post-11 September 2001 world: returning from the Berlin Film Festival last year, he was detained at Luton Airport and questioned under anti-terror laws. Police officers swore at him, denied him access to a lawyer and accused him of becoming an actor to further the Islamist cause.
In his alternative career as a rapper, his wryly humorous single "Post-9/11 Blues" was banned by commercial radio stations on the entirely inaccurate grounds that it sympathised with terrorism. Ahmed was recently appointed "emerging artist-in-residence" at the Royal Festival Hall in London. As a result, the media - your present correspondent included - are desperate to treat him as the Voice of a Generation. And yet it's a mantle he is extremely wary of donning.
"People keep asking me vast questions about being Muslim in Britain," he says when we meet over coffee at a central London hotel. "It would be neat, wouldn't it, to set yourself up as this post-9/11 Muslim poster boy? I'm aware of that space that people are eager to try and fill, but I can be slightly dismayed when people assume that because I'm Asian and because I'm Muslim, I must be doing it for the Muslims, doing it for the Asians. In fact, people from all kinds of backgrounds have rallied around and been supportive with Road to Guantanamo, and the main demographic buying 'Post-9/11 Blues' was white, middle-class students."
I suggest that there are similarities between Ahmed and the character he plays in Britz, Sohail Wahid, an ambitious law graduate from Bradford who signs up with MI5 and begins investigating a terrorist cell. Meanwhile, Sohail's sister Nasi ma (played by Manjinder Virk) is becoming increasingly radicalised by everyday racism, heavy-handed policing and her anger at the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. Sohail maintains his belief in his Britishness even when arrested and beaten by anti-terror cops. Certainly Kosminsky, who wrote and directed the two-part drama, recognises common ground. "Riz and Sohail are both proud of who they are," he explains. "Their identity is self-made. They are British, but they know where they came from."
Riz is not so sure. "The whole thrust of Britz is about getting past people's labels - being defined as MI5 agents or suicide bombers or even as Muslims. It's about rehumanising people, which is so, so important in the current climate. Even though, on paper, if you list the labels, you might see similarities between Sohail and me, in fact he's a very different person. It was quite a subtle but comprehensive acting challenge - his accent, the way he holds himself, the fact that he's very quiet and almost a stiff-upper-lip English gentleman. I don't think that's me particularly, although I think there are loads of things about me that are English."
He admits, however, that he shares certain experiences and values with his character. "Sohail has grown up experiencing racist abuse all his life, but he doesn't allow it to push him away from the mainstream to a point where he's missing out on opportunities. He doesn't allow it to stop him defining himself as British first. I've experienced both street violence and abuse by authority. One of my first memories of a policeman was one making a racist comment, and I had a knife stuck to my throat by a couple of skinheads when I was eight. But it's about whether you let that define you. Being an ethnic minority in the UK can to some extent be about polishing that chip on your shoulder, wearing it proudly. That's not for me."
Unlike the Bradford-born Sohail, 24-year-old Ahmed grew up in Wembley, Middlesex. His father had worked for the Pakistani merchant navy before becoming a shipping agent. Like his elder brother and sister, Riz secured a government- assisted place at a private school and his siblings went on to become a psychiatrist and a solicitor, respectively - "so I'm the black sheep of the family". He started acting in school, wrote his first lyrics aged 14 and by the sixth form he was MCing on local pirate radio stations in north-west London. Teachers told him he would make a great barrister, so he studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where the music scene was so woefully conservative that he was moved to found his own drum'n'bass club, Hit and Run.
It was at this point that Ahmed became acutely aware of the tensions surrounding his own identity. "I was at Oxford doing PPE, but for Oxford people I was that MC, and for people back home I was that kid at Oxford," he explains. "I've always been aware of how restrictive those boundaries can be, so I want to blur them. My new single, called 'People Like People', is about how everything becomes a fashion accessory, from your ethnicity to your body."
That is just one more reason he would prefer not to speak for anyone other than himself. "The sad state of affairs is that when there's an Asian guy on the screen he's not just a character, he's portraying the community," he sighs. "The only reason those roles become archetypal is because there's so few of them around.
"Being Muslim plays only a role in my own life, and I don't think it needs to impinge on other people's - especially when it comes to my work as an actor or a rapper. It's definitely not the primary thing that I draw on."
But doesn't his work to date indicate otherwise, I wonder. "How would you characterise the work I've done so far?" he shoots back. Well, it's not Richard Curtis, I offer. He laughs. "As soon as they start seeing Asian guys in castings for romantic leads opposite Keira Knightley, I'll be first in the queue, I promise you."
"Britz" is on Channel 4 on Wednesday 31 October and Thursday 1 November at 9pm
"People Like People" is released on 29 October on iTunes. For information on live dates log on to: www.myspace.com/rizmc