Riz Ahmed was hospitalized while filming 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — an experience that later helped him connect to his acclaimed role in The Sound of Metal.
“Around the time of taking on Sound of Metal, I had a very intense health-related experience myself,” Ahmed, 42, said on the Thursday, August 28, episode of the “Podcrushed” podcast, referring to his 2019 movie about a drummer who loses his hearing. “I had to grapple with the grief but also the acceptance around that.”
Ahmed recalled to podcast host Penn Badgley that he was “in the middle of filming” Rogue One when he felt off internally.
“My body just, kind of, gave up on me,” he said. “I was extremely exhausted, [and] I was hospitalized for a brief period. I just had to really try and retrain my strength. It was, like, building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually.”
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Ahmed continued, “For a minute, I was, like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’ It really wasn’t clear. Something very silent and very intense had happened to me, and I wasn’t getting better quickly.”
While hospital-bound, Ahmed said that he felt a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror.”
“[I also felt] a tremendous liberation and gratitude and acceptance,” he noted. “Someone told me that cancer patients, once they’ve recovered, say, ‘You know what? I’m so glad I’m better, but I wish I could bottle that slightly zen-like gratitude I had when I lost everything.’ I always think that when you’re brought to your knees, you’re halfway to praying.”
Ahmed added, “You’re humbled in that way when something is taken away from you, you become even more acutely aware of everything you have.”
The British actor further noted that, “on a health level,” it was difficult not to have “control” over his body.
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“You realize, like, you don’t control anything, man,” Ahmed reflected. “You don’t control a single thing. You don’t even control your body. Then, in moments of trippy clarity in the darkness, I realized [that] everything you have is a gift. .. In a strange way, I never felt more grateful, more at peace, more content than when I felt I was going to lose my whole life.”
After Ahmed’s recovery, he read the script for The Sound of Metal and knew he needed to be involved in the project.
“I was like, ‘I need to tell this story. I need to tell a story for me [and] I need to make sense of this,’” he explained. “I think that’s one of the greatest privileges that we get as storytellers.”
