Acting Up: Riz Ahmed
Welcome to ACTING UP, the place where we celebrate standout performances in TV, streaming and film. Other than spotlighting exceptional work from recent projects, this feature also shines a light on how certain actors got where they are today. Have a peek and then check out these notable performances to help hone your craft.
The Snapshot: Riz Ahmed plays a heavy-metal drummer reeling from a sudden loss of hearing and the effect it has on his life, love, and sobriety in the Amazon Studios drama Sound of Metal.
(Note: Sound of Metal was shot in 2019 but released theatrically on November 20, 2020, before making its streaming debut on Amazon Prime on December 4.)
The Performer: Riz Ahmed
The Film: Sound of Metal
The Performance:
It’s tempting to call Sound of Metal a story about a man with a disability. After all, coping with a rapid decline into deafness is one of the movie’s major plot points, as it befalls Riz Ahmed’s character Ruben Stone suddenly and tragically, leaving him in a world of stunned silence.
In reality, however, this film rings true more as an important human drama that shines a light on a community that believes deafness is not a handicap. The story starts with Ruben, who we meet as he’s wailing on the drums at a gig for his punk-metal band Blackgammon, comprised of him and his girlfriend Lou. It’s a high-decibel cacophony that’s shown for an uncomfortable amount of time. Fully intentional by writer/director Darius Marder I’m sure — who soon saddles Ruben with a dramatic loss of hearing that sends him into panic mode as he deals with his new plight.
After a doctor lays out the grim prognosis for his hearing, and the expensive cochlear implant surgery option that’s available, Ruben’s girlfriend encourages him to contact his sobriety sponsor for advice. The result: He recommends a community of deaf that have embraced their silent world. This is where the soul of Sound of Metal lives — and the backdrop for the film’s more poignant and heartbreaking moments. Not to mention, Ahmed’s outstanding performance.
For the millennial musician, the change is radical. His girlfriend has gone back home, his cell phone has been confiscated, and he’s focused on learning American Sign Language (ASL). His relationship to the people in the deaf community is strained at first but evolves over time — especially when it comes to the children in the deaf community (who he begins to teach drumming to). It’s in these sweeter moments that Ruben begins to win us over.
Yet, he is a recovering addict, so all of this is no piece of cake — and Ahmed plays that detail really well given the massive sensory void in his character’s life that he’s racing to fill.
For Ruben, there’s always a hope that he can get his former life back — which leads him down pathways that put his gratifying new start at risk. How he devolves from there, I’ll leave to the film to tell — but know that Ahmed’s portrayal, often seen through tight close-ups that give us access to his searching eyes, feels tragic at times, hopeful at others. The result is a great film.
With a less talented actor, Ruben’s disability might have felt like a gratuitous grab at low-hanging empathy fruit. But with Ahmed as the centerpiece (surrounded by other gifted performers), you can’t help but appreciate Sound of Metal because it’s the kind of story that rarely gets told.
The Career:
Hardly an unknown, the 38-year-old British actor of Pakistani descent has already won an Emmy for HBO’s The Night Of (2017) and has been nominated for several other top prizes in his young career including a Golden Globe, SAG Award, and slew of British Independent Film Awards.
The fact that he’s very good at acting would lead you to believe that Ahmed’s been acting since he was a child and reaping the rewards of that early commitment. But this isn’t the case. Turns out Ahmed graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 2004, an interesting and nontraditional origin story for a super-gifted actor.
Ahmed eventually enrolled at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama before trying his hand out as rapper Riz MC, using the hip-hop alias to launch his single Post 9/11 Blues in 2006. According to his IMDB trivia section, the song was temporarily banned from British airplay.
Over the years, the talented actor has appeared in many notable projects (and too many to recount here) including the film Nightcrawler (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and the comedic Islamic terrorism spoof Four Lions (2010), where he played an incompetent British terrorist. (Ahmed’s first significant role in The Road to Guantanamo took on a similar topic, minus the humor.) But without question, Ahmed’s most well-known performance to date has to be HBO’s The Night Of, the courtroom thriller where Ahmed played Nasir “Naz” Khan, a twentysomething who wakes up to find the woman he partied with the night before stabbed to death.
As for his commitment to the craft, Ahmed reportedly studied sign language for seven months and wore “auditory blockers” inside his ear canal to play Ruben during deaf scenes in Sound of Metal. The actor claims he couldn’t hear anything, let alone “the sound of [his] own voice.”
What can be heard, however, is the 2021 awards buzz circling the bright British actor, who seems likely to get more nominations for his moving performance. To date, he already won runner-up to the late Chadwick Boseman for Best Actor from the L.A. Film Critics last December.
Where he goes next, well, that will be interesting to watch.
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Gregg Rosenzweig has been a writer, creative director and managing editor for various entertainment clients, ad agencies and digital media companies over the past 20 years. He is also a partner in the talent management/production company, The Rosenzweig Group.
