In this Screen Tests interview, Riz Ahmed (The Night Of, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The OA, Girls) talks his first acting job in The Road to Guantánamo, taking selfies with immigration services as they gave him a patdown, how E.T. made him cry, his first kiss, and his traumatizing first memory.

Since the premiere of the HBO crime drama The Night Of came out, Riz Ahmed has been embraced as one of the internet's new boyfriends, joining the ranks of actors like Oscar Isaac and Donald Glover. But Ahmed is not just a chameleon-like actor, who can go from dark thrillers, like Nightcrawler, to playing a surf instructor opposite Lena Dunham in Girls, but a musician who performs as part of the Swet Shop Boys, a group whose two albums have been critically acclaimed, and a socially-conscious actor who is not afraid to speak up about causes he believes in, like when he wrote an essay for The Guardian about the difficulties of being a British Pakistani actor.

RIZ AHMED: The first time I left London was at the age of 2 to go to Pakistan, um, to be circumcised. We make a whole song and dance about it. That's my first memory, still traumatized. There's a bit gap where I probably tried to block out all the memories until I get to 5.

W MAG: The Night Of, which is why you're here, is to some degree about this. How did that come to you? I thought it made it, to your point, a much bigger point than just about race.

RIZ AHMED: The character I played in The Night Of, Nasir Khan, goes on a big kind of transformative journey over the course of the series and to me it just kind of underlines something that I believe to be true as an actor, which is that we're just molded by our circumstances and our experiences. No one is inherently good, inherently bad, inherently evil or saintly. People are just molded by their circumstances.

W MAG: So you've written a lot about your experiences with things like the immigration ban. Has it had any effect?

RIZ AHMED: It was kind of funny when I first started traveling to America it was not long after I had done the Road to Guantanamo and we filmed that in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. We'd been to those countries within six months of each other. So when I turned up at American immigration for the first time it was like, 'Okay, you've been on like an Axis of Evil world tour kind of thing and they'd pull me aside for three and a half hours every time. I wrote an essay about this in The Guardian and it's kind of like a surreal and pointless experience. But now it's kind of slightly different experience. I don't get stopped in the U.S. because I've got a visa but I get stopped in the U.K. before I board the plane. But what's funny is that the neighborhood where Heathrow Airport is in is a heavily South-Asian neighborhood, and the kids working there are often fans of mine. So the kids that pull me aside to search me are also like asking me for selfies while they're swabbing me for explosives and stuff or you know going through my underpants and like quoting my raps back at me.

W MAG: But it must be nice now to not get parts that are always a terrorist or something that's more what one would consider to be typecasting. For instance, how did Girls, where you play a surf instructor, come about?

RIZ AHMED: I really have to credit Lena Dunham for that. I can't speak highly enough of Lena. She's truly inspirational. When you work with her, you see she's on set, she's running the set, she's lovely and kind and sweet to everyone while directing the shoot, improvising and completing the new set of lines for herself from one take to the next, coming and really sensitively directing you and then doing rewrites and she's a whirlwind.

W MAG: So who did you have a crush on, a cinematic crush on when you were growing up or even now?

RIZ AHMED: Oh, growing up my cinematic crush were Bollywood actresses predominantly because those were the films I would see a lot growing up so it was Manisha Koirala, Aishwarya Rai, Raveena Tandon, Madhuri Dixit—these iconic divas of Bollywood cinema.

Read the full interview here --> https://www.wmagazine.com/story/riz-a...

Still haven’t subscribed to W on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/wyoutubesub

ABOUT W
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why in the world of fashion and style. W provides the ultimate insider experience with an original, provocative approach to art, culture, videos, travel, fashion, and beauty.

Riz Ahmed on The Night Of, Lena Dunham, and Why E.T. Made Him Cry | Screen Tests | W Magazine