HERE IS A PARTIAL INVENTORY of Riz Ahmed’s projects from his breakthrough year of 2016:
— Two television shows, “The Night Of” and “The OA”;
— Four feature films, including the blockbusters “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “Jason Bourne”;
— One essay contributed to the best-selling book “The Good Immigrant”;
— And two major musical moments, a guest appearance on the “Hamilton” mixtape and the album “Cashmere,” released by Ahmed and the rapper Heems as part of their hip-hop duo Swet Shop Boys.
It was a lot, for good and for ill. In December of that year, Ahmed took to Instagram for a celebratory look back that sounded more than a little exhausted. “Only a year ago, for various reasons, I wasn’t sure I could carry on doing this,” he wrote. “I had a realisation through some really tough moments that we have no control in this life. And it got me down, but then, seeing no other way forwards, I had to embrace this helplessness.”
Over Zoom four years later, I read the caption to Ahmed, who blinked twice. “When did I write that?” he said. “I have no memory of that. Wow. Wow. I had a bit of a burnout.”
Ahmed has always been eager to pile his plate high. “Like Ruben, I rely heavily on being obsessively busy,” he said. A successful career as an actor practically demands an itinerant lifestyle and that came naturally to Ahmed, who grew up in Wembley, London, with a father who worked for the Pakistani merchant navy: “He was away from home a lot, so maybe I’ve internalized this idea that what you’re meant to do as a working man is go out of the house and cover as much ground as possible in the world.”
Or maybe, Ahmed mused, a child of immigrants will always feel an innate sense of wanderlust. “There’s a constant narrative of home being somewhere else, home’s the next place you’re going to get to,” he said. “But if home is always the next place, then you’re building a tent on quicksand. The work itself is the place you can live, maybe.”