Riz Ahmed says being brown in the West feels like being stuck in a spy thriller you didn't ask for — surveillance, torn allegiances, mistrust — which became the emotional core of Bait.
Where this was said
At 4:30 · chapter starts 2:53
Mendoza sets up Bait as a show about an actor of colour trying to break out of stereotype, with Bond as the vehicle. Ahmed immediately complicates the premise: James Bond came late in the writing process, he says, and the show is fundamentally about self-love and how all of us perform a public version of ourselves — on social media, on stage, anywhere we're being watched. He gestures at his own borrowed clothes and jokes that he's reading from an autocue, embodying the very gap the show explores. Then comes the pivot that reframes everything: Ahmed invokes Jordan Peele's observation that being Black in America feels like a horror movie. For Ahmed, being brown in the West feels like being stuck in a spy thriller you never signed up for — surveilled, suspected, caught between allegiances. Bond, then, does double duty: symbol of aspiration and nod to a genre Ahmed desperately wanted to inhabit. [1] — Riz Ahmed "Being brown in the West feels like you're stuck in a spy thriller that you did not ask to be in." 04:42
Bait is a six-episode Amazon Prime series in which Ahmed plays Shah Latif, an actor who auditions to be the next James Bond, exploring themes of self-love, identity, and authenticity.
James Bond came late to the Bait writers' room, but he arrived as the perfect symbol. The show is really about self-love and how people chase validation in all the wrong places — and what better emblem of decisive, desirable, alpha-male aspiration than 007?
Being brown in the West means living with surveillance, torn allegiances, and mistrust — the exact texture of a spy thriller. That feeling is the emotional engine behind Bait, and why James Bond served as the perfect genre vehicle to explore it.
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