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\n The question of who gets to play James Bond inspires a heady, meta, and highly watchable variation on ideas the actor has spent his entire career considering.
\n Photo: Prime\n <\/p>\n
Nearly every Riz Ahmed project shares a certainty and a question: the certainty of Ahmed\u2019s presence, of course, and the question of what his presence means, a query that is now so embedded within Ahmed\u2019s career that it also requires an \u201cof course.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bait, the new Prime Video miniseries Ahmed created, wrote, and stars in, is both an exercise in self-analysis and an interrogation of it, a breakneck romp through farce, satire, thriller, family drama, and romantic walk-and-talk that transforms itself in each of its six episodes.\u00a0Sometimes Bait, which resuscitates the much-debated question of whether a POC actor should play James Bond, is so enamored with the idea of Ahmed as 007 that you\u2019ll suspect the whole series is just a proof of concept. Sometimes its characters\u2019 conversations about Muslim life are so breathtakingly inside baseball that you have to admire the gumption it took to willingly exclude an unaware portion of the audience. Sometimes a single episodic observation about the hypocrisy of the entertainment industry is so incisive and compelling that you\u2019ll wish Bait had devoted a little more time to it and a little less time \u2014 and I\u2019m being serious here \u2014 to Patrick Stewart voicing a pig\u2019s head. And yet. Flaws, deviations, and all, the series always feels like a singular, boldly conceived experiment in service of two questions pervasive through Ahmed\u2019s career: Where has representation gotten us, and what has looking to the ruling order to provide that representation cost us?<\/p>\n
What does it mean for Ahmed, a British Pakistani Muslim man, to play not just an aspiring terrorist (Four Lions<\/a>), a radical leader (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), and a young man accused of murder by an Islamophobic NYPD (The Night Of<\/a>) but also an ambulance-chasing videographer (Nightcrawler<\/a>), a utopian in the American Old West (The Sisters Brothers<\/a>), a hardcore drummer losing his hearing (Sound of Metal<\/a>), and an ally for whistleblowers (Relay<\/a>)? Does Ahmed\u2019s presence make a project more authentic, more edgy, more controversial, more inclusive? When does an actor become a representative of their racial, cultural, or religious identity, and when does that representation become a liability? Through his work as an actor, producer, rapper, and activist, Ahmed\u2019s been considering all this for years, surfacing these queries and prodding them under bright lights, and Bait is another go-round in this ongoing reflection.<\/p>\n This could be dismissed as repetitive. But the repetition feels like the point, like Ahmed keeps reconsidering how to tangibly manifest progress because change is so slow and so incremental.\u00a0In 2017, Ahmed\u2019s speech<\/a> to the British House of Commons about the importance of diversity in storytelling inspired the Riz Test<\/a>, a five-criteria measure of how Muslims are portrayed in the media; in 2022, a study<\/a> by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that Muslims are \u201crendered invisible\u201d onscreen. The strides forward for South Asian, Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim actors are tangible, but they\u2019re not yet transformational. Ahmed was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for Sound of Metal, won an Oscar for his 2022 short film The Long Goodbye, and co-starred in arguably the world\u2019s biggest franchise with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but these successes are anomalies, not the norm. The very premise of Bait is a hypothetical exactly because there still hasn\u2019t been a non-white Bond and because the character \u2014 like so many figures in our biggest IPs \u2014 is inherently a representative of a status quo that excludes brown and Black people from its uppermost echelons. Idris Elba was fan-cast for years as Bond, but he was knighted<\/a> sooner than that became a reality! The industry\u2019s flaws are ongoing and obvious.<\/p>\n Into all this enters Bait, in which Ahmed plays a struggling actor named Shah Latif. Years ago, he was a popular left-leaning rapper and an up-and-comer winning film-festival awards (yes, Shah\u2019s a pretty recognizable analog for Ahmed); now he\u2019s keeping the tags on his Prada sweaters to return them after auditions. One role might change his fortunes: Bond. The series opens mid-audition, and Shah is suave, sophisticated, and self-composed until a sexy baddie asks him, \u201cDo you even know who you are?\u201d Shah\u2019s been tripping over that question every time they run the scene, because it hits at a core uncertainty in his own life. Is he brown enough, British enough, Muslim enough? With the cameras on him, he can\u2019t find an answer \u2014 but Shah, once he is politely but firmly dismissed from set, is at least clever enough to know that if he\u2019s photographed walking out of the building, he\u2019ll spark casting rumors that will set the Internet on fire. So he purposefully leaves via the wrong door, flashes a sphinxlike half-smile at the paparazzi, and goes viral, generating attention both from within and outside his community.<\/p>\n His cousin Zulfi (a perpetually scene-stealing Guz Khan), who has been by Shah\u2019s side since the two of them survived a traumatic racist attack as kids, razzes him in Khan\u2019s delightfully thick Punjabi-meets-Coventry accent: \u201cDo they know about the height? Are they gonna give you special shoes?\u201d Shah\u2019s mother, Tahira (Sheeba Chaddha), despite all her prayers, hasn\u2019t gotten a Google alert with her son\u2019s name for a while, so she\u2019s excited to brag about his new Bond status to her friends and reaffirm her high placement in their social pecking order. However, Shah\u2019s casting isn\u2019t a done deal. There\u2019s a running gag about how often people mistake Shah for the far more famous Dev Patel<\/a>, and another successful brown actor is up for the part too (Himesh Patel<\/a>, having a grand, smug time), and some fellow Pakistani Brits sneer at the idea of a POC Bond at all, calling it a \u201cvanilla distraction\u201d from discussions of real political agency.<\/p>\n