Riz Ahmed reveals health scare that hospitalised him on ‘Rogue One’ set
Oscar-winning actor Riz Ahmed has opened up about a health scare he experienced in 2016 on the set of Rogue One that left him hospitalised and fearing for his life.
Ahmed starred in a handful of films throughout the 2010s, such as Four Lions and Nightcrawler. He was soon cast as a pilot in the first Star Wars spin-off, Rogue One. However, speaking newly on the Podcrushed podcast, Ahmed admitted that this time was rather difficult for him.
“Around the time of taking on (2019 project) Sound of Metal, I had had a very intense kind of health-related experience myself,” he said.
He continued, “Basically, I was in the middle of filming (Rogue One), and my body kind of gave up on me. I was extremely exhausted. I was hospitalised for a brief period, and I really tried to regain my strength. I was building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually.”
The unknown illness threatened to impact his life and career. Ahmed lamented, “For a minute, I was like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’”
When asked if he might elaborate on the specifics of the condition, Ahmed couldn’t offer much. “It really wasn’t very clear,” he commented. Rather, it was “something very silent and very intense [that] happened to me, and I wasn’t getting better quickly.”
As his condition worsened, the star experienced a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror, and yet also a kind of tremendous kind of liberation and gratitude.”
In Rogue One, the Brit starred alongside Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, and Ben Mendelsohn. Gareth James Edwards directed the stand-alone feature.
Ahmed will soon grace our screens again when starring in One Battle After Another, an upcoming American action thriller film written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
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