Riz Ahmed is opening up about a “super scary and intense” health experience that nearly derailed, but ultimately benefitted his career.
“Around the time of taking on Sound of Metal, I had had a very intense kind of health-related experience myself,” Ahmed revealed on Tuesday’s episode of the Podcrushed podcast.
Ahmed explained, “Basically, I was in the middle of filming [Rogue One: A Star Wars Story], and my body kind of gave up on me. I was extremely exhausted. I was hospitalized 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. For a minute I was like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?'”
Riz Ahmed in 2016 film ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’.
Jonathan Olley/lucasfilm
Production on Rogue One, the first live-action standalone film in the Star Wars franchise, began in August 2015 and, with extensive reshoots, stretched through the middle of the following year. Ahmed did not offer specific details on the health scare or clarify how it impacted the production and eventual promotion experience he shared with costars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn.
Even now, Ahmed reflects that “it really wasn’t clear.” He referred to the health scare as “something very silent and very intense [that] happened to me, and I wasn’t getting better quickly.” The dimension of the experience he did delve into, however, was the impact it ultimately had on his life and career.
The actor, who won an Oscar as co-creator of the 2020 live-action short film The Long Goodbye, described being confronted with a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror, and yet also a kind of tremendous kind of liberation and gratitude and acceptance” when the experience arrested his ability to move normally. “I always think that when you’re brought to your knees, you’re halfway towards praying.”
Having been “humbled in that way,” Ahmed realized, “you don’t control a single thing. You don’t even control your body. Then, in moments of kind of trippy clarity and in the darkness, I realized, then everything you have is a gift.”
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Ahmed explained that the experience played a pivotal part in his accepting a role in Darius Marder’s searing 2019 drama Sound of Metal, which earned the actor his first Oscar nomination. The film tells the story of Ruben Stone, a metal drummer who begins to rapidly lose his sense of hearing, which upends his entire life.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2021, Ahmed viewed the film’s resonance as a collective one: “I think in the context of 2020 and the pandemic, that is a journey a lot of people have been on: Go, go, go. And, This is who I am. This is my life. This is what gives me meaning. And all of a sudden, the rug has been pulled from under them. Ruben’s journey is one that almost feels like a microcosm of what we’ve been going through as a society.”
You can listen to Ahmed’s full interview on Podcrushed above.