Riz Ahmed

Riz Ahmed is a British actor and rapper who has won an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award and was named by Time in 2017 as one of the most influential people in the world. ¹ For The Night Of (2016) he became the first Asian and first Muslim to win a lead acting Emmy, and for Sound of Metal (2019) the first Muslim and British Pakistani actor nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. ¹ As a rapper he is Riz MC, one half of the Swet Shop Boys, and his second studio album, The Long Goodbye, was accompanied by a short film of the same name that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. ¹ A test of Muslim screen representation, the Riz Test, is named after him. ¹

Rizwan Ahmed was born on 1 December 1982 in Wembley, a suburb in the London Borough of Brent, to a British Pakistani family of Muhajir background; his parents had moved to England from Karachi, Pakistan, in the 1970s. ^{1 2} He attended Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, on a scholarship, graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and later studied acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. ¹ He has described a culture shock at Oxford, where he nearly dropped out and instead organised parties celebrating cultures outside the dominant one. ¹

His film career began with Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantánamo (2006), in which he played Shafiq Rasul of the Tipton Three; returning from the Berlin Film Festival, he and another actor were detained at Luton Airport, and he alleged that police asked whether he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. ¹ He played the title role in Shifty (2009), starred in Chris Morris's terrorism satire Four Lions (2010) and in Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), and broke through internationally in Nightcrawler (2014). ¹ In 2016 he played Nasir "Naz" Khan in the HBO miniseries The Night Of, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series, and Bodhi Rook in Rogue One. ¹ He played Carlton Drake in Venom (2018), produced, co-wrote and starred in Mogul Mowgli (2020), and starred as a drummer losing his hearing in Sound of Metal (2019), learning the performance that brought him Academy Award, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA nominations. ¹ He executive-produced the animated documentary Flee (2021), voiced Ballister Boldheart in Nimona (2023), and in 2026 wrote, executive-produced and starred in the limited series Bait, playing an actor from a Pakistani Muslim family cast as a non-white James Bond, which brought him a second lead-acting Emmy nomination. ¹

Inspired by jungle and hip-hop, he began on pirate radio and in freestyle rap battles in his mid-teens, and in 2006 released the satirical track "Post 9/11 Blues", written after his Luton detention and initially banned from British airplay as politically sensitive. ¹ His debut album Microscope appeared in 2011; with Heems he formed the Swet Shop Boys, whose album Cashmere (2016) was critically acclaimed. ¹ His song "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" on The Hamilton Mixtape topped the Billboard 200 and won an MTV Video Music Award in 2017, the same season he won the Emmy. ¹ His second studio album, The Long Goodbye (2020), features a guest appearance by Mahershala Ali. ¹

The English article describes Ahmed as a practising Muslim who has spoken candidly about the negative stereotyping of Muslims, personally and in society; no source names a school for him, and this record therefore carries his positions as his stance, not as a faith segment. ^{1 2} In 2017 he addressed the House of Commons on the lack of diversity in film and television, and in 2018 two researchers, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry, built the Riz Test on that speech: five questions asking whether an identifiably Muslim character is shown talking about, victimised by or perpetrating terrorism, as irrationally angry, as superstitious or backward, as a threat to a Western way of life, or — if male — as misogynistic. ¹ Ahmed acknowledged the test in 2018, writing that he was "glad to see this" and that it was "much needed". ¹ He has raised funds for Syrian refugee children and for Rohingya refugees displaced from Myanmar, and contributed an essay on airport racial profiling to the 2016 anthology The Good Immigrant. ¹ During the Gaza war he called Israel's bombing of Gaza's civilians "morally indefensible war crimes", signed the Artists4Ceasefire letter in 2023 and the Film Workers for Palestine boycott pledge published in September 2025. ¹ In 2013 he apologised to the journalist Hardeep Singh Kohli and paid substantial damages for a tweet in which he had falsely accused Kohli of attempted assault. ¹

He has been married to the American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza since 2020, and in 2025 he revealed that she had given birth to their first child. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.