The episode opens with a brief bio of Riz Ahmed — actor, rapper, producer, known for Rogue One, Sound of Metal, and Bait — before cutting to the live recording at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. Jessica Mendoza welcomes the audience, cues the Journal theme, and frames the conversation ahead: Riz Ahmed on making Hollywood work for him. Sponsor reads for Accenture and Tremfya punctuate the opening before the interview properly begins.

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 Play}

The Sudoku was solved — the symbol was Bond — but there was one enormous problem: the Broccoli family's near-legendary protectiveness of the franchise. Everyone told the team it would never happen. Ahmed's response was characteristically all-or-nothing: if there's even a 1% chance, go 100% in. So they wrote the show around the concept without any sign-off, reached out to Barbara Broccoli, went to brunch, handed her the scripts, and talked her through it. She got it — understood that the show isn't really about Bond at all, but about the feeling that life is one long audition. Ahmed's brief account of the meeting is almost comically understated, but the subtext is clear: personal conviction and charm can unlock doors that conventional wisdom says are permanently shut. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "I thought if there's just a 1% chance we can get this, we have to go 100% all in." 07:33 Play}

Mendoza spots the obvious question and goes for it: given the conversation going viral, would Ahmed actually want to play James Bond? He laughs that he's probably torched every bridge to that ever happening after making Bait. But there was a real moment, he admits, when his name was circulating in casting conversations — every British actor under 90 gets mentioned eventually. That experience forced a genuine reckoning: did he want to dedicate his life to stepping into other people's stories, or to telling his own? The answer shaped the next decade of his creative output. He lands on a desire to create new archetypes alongside Bond rather than replace him — a subtle but meaningful distinction that speaks to his broader artistic ambitions.

When Mendoza asks about the differences between working in the UK and Hollywood, Ahmed begins with the observation that the lines are increasingly blurred — Bait itself had a LA writers' room, a London production, and a Los Angeles commissioning office. But the more interesting divergence is creative: when you're a smaller fish, you have no choice but to lean into the hyper-specificity of your subculture and experience. Ahmed argues this is why British television keeps producing shows like Fleabag, I May Destroy You, and Baby Reindeer — left-field, particular, specific — that break out globally precisely because they don't try to appeal to everyone. He extends the point to Iranian cinema, where extreme resource limitations and restricted market access have produced exceptional storytelling. Creativity, he argues, is bred from necessity. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "UK creativity bred from fewer resources: Ahmed argues that the UK's smaller film budgets force hyper-specificity, which paradoxically drive…" 10:58 Play}

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 Play}

Mendoza pushes on the anxiety creative risk-takers often carry: doesn't the specificity worry you? Ahmed's answer is a firm no — not anymore. He's worked out that specificity and resonance are not in tension; they're the same thing. Nobody watching The Crown is the Queen of England, yet millions identify with her. Nobody watching Goodfellas is a Mafia gangster, yet it's one of the most beloved films ever made. What audiences respond to is honesty, and nothing signals honesty like particularity. Fleabag, I May Destroy You, Atlanta — the shows in front of his mind when making Bait — are all almost aggressively specific, and all universally beloved. It's a lesson, he says, he believes in passionately. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "Nobody is the Queen of England, yet millions identified with The Crown. Nobody is a Goodfellas gangster, yet Scorsese's film is universal. …" 16:00 Play}

The interview pauses for sponsor messages. American Beverage promotes Good2Know (goodtoknowfacts.org), a resource for transparent information about beverage ingredients. Intuit promotes its AI-native Enterprise Resource Planning solution, Intuit Enterprise Suite, aimed at growing businesses with complex multi-entity financial structures.

Mendoza brings Hollywood's bigger challenges into frame — shrinking cinema audiences, streaming wars, AI, IP consolidation — and asks how Ahmed factors business thinking into his creative decisions. His answer is layered. Hamlet, he argues, has a long tail: contemporary Shakespeare adaptations endure, and there hasn't been one since Branagh's 1997 film. Bait was designed to break through in pop culture — and touch wood, it has. But the deeper insight is about how he defines success. The projects that have worked best, he says, are the ones where he wasn't chasing a commercial result. Bait's internal definition of success was genre-level: can Episode 2 be a Bond film? Can Episode 3 be a Bollywood soap opera? Can Episode 4 be a Linklater walk-and-talk? Nail those, and everything else follows. If you dance like no one's watching, that's the best dancing. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "Episode 2 is a Bond film. Episode 3 is a Bollywood soap opera. Episode 4 is a Linklater walk-and-talk. Bait's definition of success wasn't …" 20:00 Play}

Mendoza pushes back: you still need resources, and resources require a commercial argument. How do you actually balance artistic integrity with the market? Ahmed's answer is elegant: don't try to hold both things in the same person. Follow your gut — if something excites you viscerally, that excitement is a signal worth trusting, a la Steve Jobs' focus group of one. But then surround yourself with hard-nosed people who will tell you flatly that it will never sell. The balance isn't internal; it's structural. You outsource it. Mendoza gets it — she draws a parallel to podcast-making, where the imperative to make the best show you can has to coexist with the reality of ad sales. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "Trust your gut on creative decisions — then surround yourself with hard-nosed people who will tell you it will never sell. That's the balan…" 21:50 Play}

Mendoza notes that Ahmed isn't just an actor — he runs a production company and makes music. Is that the new requirement for success? He's careful not to prescribe it, but honest that it's the new reality: there's no longer a clean wall between the creative act and the business of selling it. Producers must now be deeply involved in marketing. Creators must think about the entire journey from first idea to social video. For Ahmed personally, it's not strategic but organic — music, writing, acting, producing all feed each other creatively. But the wider industry truth he lands on is harder to argue with: we're all being asked to cover more bases, whether we want to or not. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "There's no longer a wall between creative and commerce in entertainment. Producers must be marketers; creators must be brand strategists. T…" 23:10 Play}

Where are the doors opening and closing in Hollywood right now? Ahmed's answer surprises the room: he says he needs advice from young creators more than they need his. A new generation of genuinely talented storytellers is building entirely new paradigms on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — playing by completely different rules. Ahmed is inspired by them and troubled by the gap: these creators have audiences, income, and creative independence. To recruit them into long-form storytelling, you're asking them to walk away from all of that for two years of unpaid development. That's not a talent pipeline — it's a talent deterrent. He's genuinely uncertain how to bridge it, but asking the question is itself an act of intellectual honesty from someone inside the system. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "The next generation's most talented storytellers are on Instagram and TikTok — but asking them to walk away from their audience and income …" 24:50 Play}

The conversation zeroes in on the structural failure at the heart of Hollywood's talent pipeline: unpaid development. Ahmed recounts that the producer of Everything Everywhere All at Once — one of the most acclaimed films of the decade — was driving Ubers throughout the entire development process and half of production just to make ends meet. That's not an inspiring bootstrap story; it's a cautionary one. The industry cannot expect to attract and retain the best emerging talent if the price of entry is financial self-immolation. Ahmed's prescription is simple: compensate people for the journey of development, not just the fruits of it. The marathon has to be paid for. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "The producer of Everything Everywhere All at Once drove Ubers to survive development. That's not a badge of honour — it's a system failure.…" 27:15 Play}

Mendoza asks whether short-form content creation is genuinely part of Ahmed's art, or just a necessary commercial chore. His answer is both: for Bait, they filmed a series of fake press conferences in which an interviewer calls the idea of Ahmed playing Bond 'hilarious' and he crashes out in outrage. They leaked it. It went viral. The split was roughly 80/20 — 80% of viewers defending Ahmed, 20% calling him arrogant. But the 20% were also exactly right, in a way: the show is called Bait. The entire stunt was a piece of meta-marketing so elegantly designed it worked whether or not the audience understood it. Making it, Ahmed admits, is a genuine art form — distilling storytelling down to haiku. He's had to become more adept in it. ^{[1] — Riz Ahmed "They filmed fake press conferences where an interviewer laughs at the idea of Ahmed playing Bond, and he 'crashes out.' It went viral: 20% …" 28:30 Play}

Mendoza asks the final question: what does Ahmed hope to inspire with projects like Bait and Hamlet? He deflects any paving-the-way framing and instead points to the filmmakers who have inspired him — specifically citing Sinners, Ryan Coogler's blues-vampire period film, as proof that utterly specific passion projects can break through at scale. His aspiration is the same: be unapologetic, give people something genuinely distinctive, and trust that's the only way to stand out in a saturated market. Mendoza thanks him, the crowd applauds, and she closes with a plug for her Instagram (@_JessicaMendoza), a call for listener input on future live show locations, and the standard Journal sign-off.