I sat down to interview Riz Ahmed to discuss his starring role in the upcoming film Hamlet, which Vertical acquired after it played at TIFF, Telluride, and BFI.
Set within London’s elite South Asian community, it’s a wild ride and bold update on the material.
Ahmed, as Hamlet, goes on a mad bender to exact revenge on his uncle. He is mad and sane, logical and illogical, romantic and cold, and many other wonderful contrasts. It’s no shock that Ahmed excels in this role. He is exceptional at pushing himself to extremes.
When I spoke with Riz, it seemed like the madness he generated for the character was a bit of lived circumstances:
“I’d only slept one or two hours because I’d just become a father, and the director Aneil Karia had just become a father, and it’s a play about fathers and fatherhood.”
He continued:
“And it was like the universe, the ghost of Shakespeare saying you want to tell a story about fathers, you’re going to enter that insomniac Twilight Zone. You know, and so there was a rawness and a frazzledness, and it honestly felt like a kind of unraveling that was real.”
Check out Ahmed as this mad prince here:
Ahmed is one of the greatest actors of his generation. And he’s racked up the awards to back it:
Oscar winner - Best Short Film
Oscar-Nominee for Best Actor - Sound of Metal (2019)
Emmy Winner for HBO’s The Night Of (2016)
Personally, I have two favorite Riz Ahmed performances, the first is in Nightcrawler (2014) as Jake Gyllenhaal’s sad sack assistant (job interview clip), the second is in HBO’s The Night Of (2016), as a young man who goes from having the night of his life to a living nightmare (trailer).
His performance in Vertical’s Hamlet is up there with the best of them. Releasing on April 10th.
