Riz Ahmed’s life and career have been one long series of contradictions. He’s zigged and zagged between television and film, jumping from genre to genre — from the outrageous 2010 suicide-bomber comedy Four Lions to the poignant story of a drummer who loses his hearing in 2019’s Sound of Metal (which earned him a lead actor Oscar nom) to last year’s stunning Hamlet.
In 2016, he starred in HBO’s thriller The Night Of, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. He popped up in the final season of Girls as Paul-Louis, a laid-back surfing instructor who has a brief fling with Hannah (Lena Dunham), earning him a guest acting Emmy nom in 2017, the same year as his win. Then in 2022 he won an Oscar for The Long Goodbye, a live-action short film he wrote, coproduced and starred in. "I feel like my whole life has been about juxtapositions and contradictions," Ahmed says. "Until you get to a point and realize that the messiness of those contradictions is actually quite funny."
Bait, Ahmed’s six-episode Prime Video series, is a comedy of incongruence. He stars as Shah Latif, a British-Pakistani actor who finds himself auditioning for the biggest role of all: James Bond. (Ahmed, along with many of Hollywood’s most prominent male actors, has himself been talked about for the role, which remains unfilled at the time of printing.) He is the creator, executive producer, cowriter and star of Bait, for which he serves as coshowrunner with Ben Karlin (Minx, Modern Family).
“It’s about how sometimes life can feel like one big audition,” he says. “You’re always auditioning for the job, you’re always trying to prove to yourself and others that you’re good enough — but secretly you’re having a panic attack, and no one’s giving you the script.”
Belonging, fitting in, playing roles given to him by the prevailing culture — whether he chose them or not — have always been part of Ahmed’s story. His parents moved to Northwest London from Pakistan in the 1970s, whereupon he secured a scholarship to a private school, earned a place at Oxford and went on to study acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Ahmed is hard to categorize, and so is Bait, a meta-comedy with a strong family element, long passages in Urdu, a stunning Punjabi rap soundtrack and, of course, that 007 story arc.
"I’m into obscure music, super-specific comedy, love stories, action thrillers —storytelling that blurs the lines between reality and fiction," says Ahmed, who also performs as rapper Riz MC. "I wanted to make Bait a love letter to all the genres and all the tones that excite me."
Will Bait be the show that finally defines him? "If this is the thing that defines me, I’d be happy," he says. "Because I think this show itself is hard to define."
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #5, 2026, under the title "Role Reversal."
