Riz Ahmed is just too good to be James Bond
In his new Amazon Prime series Bait, Riz Ahmed plays a struggling actor whose audition for the next James Bond movie crashes and burns, but when he’s snapped by the paparazzi while leaving the studio, the photos spark an online debate about what it would mean to have an actor of South-Asian descent portray the iconic secret agent.
It’s the internet, so there’s a lot of hate speech flying around, and then, a pig’s head gets hurled through his parents’ front window, which is a grave move considering his Pakistani heritage.
When the series starts, Ahmed shows us just how good he would be as Bond. He’s got the jawline and the gravitas, and you get the sense that he’d be pretty good at smoothly sipping a martini at a casino bar while scanning the crowd for an assassin, but by the conclusion of the first episode, it’s hard not to come to a different conclusion.
Sure, Ahmed could play Bond, but he’d be wasted on him as well. There’s a reason Daniel Craig kept trying to leave the franchise and dove right into risky accent work upon his exit; 007 is too bland a character for great actors, and Ahmed is one of them.
In Bait, which he also created, the Sound of Metal star gets to dig deep into family and cultural tensions, explore the parts of London where people actually live and party and go to restaurants instead of the parts that Hollywood likes to film, and imagine how the world would respond to the possibility of a Bond who isn’t white. Ahmed is a shining example of combating underrepresentation with representation. In the absence of shows like this, he made one, and the results are charming as hell.
As Shah Latif, Ahmed presents a semiautobiographical version of himself who wrestles with self-doubt. Is he selling out by drumming up publicity after his dismal Bond audition? Is he ‘swapping political art for vanilla distraction’ by leaving behind his rapping career in favour of chasing Hollywood success? Is he even a good actor? All of this is explored in a refreshingly frank, unself-serving manner that is often sorely absent in fictional portrayals of the acting profession, where it is both meaty and light-hearted, making for the perfect balance of entertainment and substance.
In another recent project, Ahmed played the titular Dane in a contemporary adaptation of Hamlet. Directed by Aneil Karia, the film pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of finding a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s most famous play, particularly presenting a wholly novel take on the “to be or not to be” speech, in which Ahmed as Hamlet hurtles down a road in a high-speed car chase, recklessly daring fate to decide for him rather than morbidly questioning whether life is worth living. It’s an inspired choice, and it wouldn’t work if Ahmed weren’t so convincing as the tortured heir to a business empire who is being torn between loyalties and wracked with self-loathing. Again, he shows us that his talents as an actor and producer are only limited by budget.
Ever since Craig stepped down as Bond in 2021, speculation has run rampant about who will replace him, to the point that you can bet actual money on it. The narrative around this horse race is a convenient publicity stunt for the franchise because it makes the role seem like Hollywood’s most coveted opportunity, but as everyone who delighted in Craig’s transformation into Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out series can attest, it is the definition of a gilded cage. It’s where acting careers go to stagnate, and if things were fair, it should always go to a middle-aged fashion model who can deliver lines and not much else.
Ahmed’s name was one of the many floated as Craig’s replacement, and although he would undoubtedly have excelled in the role, Bait and Hamlet are reminders that he is much better served making his own projects. Just give him a budget, and he’ll keep the audience surprised and delighted, something that the Bond franchise can only dream of.
