“He’s powerless, he’s being gaslit… a lot of people feel that way” – Riz Ahmed on why his “fresh” adaptation of Hamlet speaks to our “unfair” times.
For Ahmed, “a musical chairs of… studio execs leaving” meant it’s taken 13 years to bring his modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the screen.
While the wait has clearly been frustrating for the Oscar-winning actor, he says he’s come to realise “this is the time for this story”.
“Hamlet is feeling the way a lot of us are, you know, he’s feeling the world’s an unfair place,” he tells Sky News. “He’s powerless about it. He’s being gaslit about it. He’s complicit in it… and a lot of people feel that way.”
Ahmed says he became “obsessed” with the story as a teenager.
“I had an amazing English teacher who gave me the play to look at because he saw that I was feeling out of place.”
Filmed as an action thriller reimagined in modern London, the actor says he’d love the movie to be shown to students instead of the “very-old filmed plays” which have traditionally been shown in schools.
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Deploying a shaky first-person camera technique, stylistically the adaptation certainly feels edgy and original with Hamlet’s iconic “To be or not to be” speech delivered at high speed in a car.
“Really, my biggest hope is that they show this to students, that this very visceral version is the one that people have in their minds when they think of a filmed version.”
It sees Ahmed reunited with his creative collaborator, director Aneil Karia. In 2022 the pair won an Oscar for their short film, The Long Goodbye.
Ahmed jokes: “I thought, ‘if it wins, I’ll take [Hamlet] to him, if it doesn’t, I’ll delete his number’ – and so it turned out alright!”
‘Destroyed’ from lack of sleep
In the past, the actor has admitted being an “obsessive perfectionist” when it comes to the projects he works on. When asked if becoming a dad might have seen a shift in Ahmed’s focus and made him a little less intense to work with, the pair crack up laughing.
As Karia diplomatically explains: “The creative process is like a long, winding one, right? In the shoot, Riz operates almost entirely on bodily emotional instinct… there is something raw and kind of beautiful about how it goes into that.”
“It’s the edit!” Ahmed chips in, laughing.
Ahmed says becoming a new dad while, at the same time, Karia was a father to young kids going through sleep regressions certainly made the shoot feel “a bit more raw”.
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“We basically both were completely destroyed with lack of sleep. You know, parents get to that kind of breaking point, they hit that wall. We were going through that during the making of this thing.”
But, Ahmed says, he leaned into that.
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“This is a story about fatherhood, so we should have to experience some of that,” he explains.
“A lot of that intense, irritable unravelling which you’ll see on screen – that was just the truth of it. You know, sometimes when you’re that exhausted, you bypass the brain. You have to go from instinct, so I think weirdly having families forced us to not be as precious.”
Hamlet opens in cinemas in the UK on 6 February.
