Since playing the villain Carlton Drake in Venom (2018) opposite Tom Hardy, Riz Ahmed has deliberately stepped away from big-budget blockbusters to tell more personal stories.
Where this was said
At 12:52 · chapter starts 12:35
Mendoza gently confronts Ahmed with the fact that he hasn't appeared in a big-budget blockbuster since Venom in 2018 — is that opportunity, choice, or something else? Ahmed doesn't flinch. Around 2017, he was on a mission he'd set for himself: pop up in big pre-existing stories and change the furniture from within. He believed — and still does — that stories can transport you to a world you've never visited and let you recognise yourself in a stranger. That's how culture stretches. But somewhere along the way, a different question emerged: what if I build the rooms myself? What if I tell my own stories? The freedom to control casting, genre, narrative approach — to tell stories that speak to the specificity of his own experience rather than be corralled into dry documentary realism — became the point. Sound of Metal, Mogul Mowgli, Hamlet, Bait: all evidence of what happened when he took the mask off. [1] — Riz Ahmed "Ahmed spent years trying to 'change the furniture in other people's rooms' — popping up in big IP films to stretch culture from within. The…" 13:00
Ahmed spent years trying to 'change the furniture in other people's rooms' — popping up in big IP films to stretch culture from within. Then he asked a different question: what if he built his own rooms? That pivot gave us Sound of Metal, Mogul Mowgli, and Bait.
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