Riz Ahmed remembers when he went to a London screening of Blue Valentine and learned that filmmaker Derek Cianfrance had been trying to make that movie for 10 years. “And I thought, ‘What an idiot! Who’s gonna stick to the film for 10 years?’” says Ahmed. “That’s lit. I’m never doing that.”
But during a live Little Gold Men interview at the Toronto Film Festival, Ahmed admits that he’s wanted to make a modern telling of Hamlet since he was 16. “So joke’s on me in the end,” says the 42-year-old.
In high school, Ahmed gravitated toward Shakespeare’s story about a young man who discovers that his father was murdered by his uncle, because he felt a similar sort of angst about his place in the world. Although it took Ahmed decades to make the film, it finally happened at just the right time. After building up a successful acting career—starring in films like Nightcrawler, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Rogue One—Ahmed was nominated for an Oscar for The Sound of Metal and won an Emmy for the HBO miniseries The Night Of. He also began producing and won an Oscar in 2022 for the short The Long Goodbye, which he made with director Aneil Karia.
As Ahmed tells Little Gold Men during their chat at the St. Regis Toronto, Karia would be the final piece of his Hamlet adaptation. Their film is raw and full of torment, centered on a wealthy British South Asian family and anchored by Ahmed’s bold and unrelenting portrayal of Hamlet. Listen or read on below to find out why the adaptation was such a “labor of love” for Ahmed, what he cherishes about making independent films, and how becoming a father affected his performance.
Vanity Fair: When did you first get the idea to make a modern version of Hamlet?
Riz Ahmed: As a teenager, like a lot of us do at that time, I was going through a very rough, raw, kind of turbulent patch in my life. I had this incredible teacher who took me under his wing and gave me this play. I found this character that was feeling kind of how I was feeling at the time because, at its heart, Hamlet is about a character who’s grieving. He’s grieving his father. I think that means two things: He’s grieving the way he thought the world was, and coming into contact with actually how unfair it is. And that’s how I felt at that time.
The other thing he’s grieving is having any kind of clear roadmap about how to be a man. I was in a kind of crisis of masculinity, and I feel like those two things that drew me to the play then are just as resonant, if not more so, right immediately. We are all grieving. The world is so messed up, and we feel powerless in the face of it. We feel gaslit about it, and we feel complicit in it. And that’s Hamlet, you know?
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