Riz Ahmed has wanted to make a Hamlet movie since he was 16 and he found it easy to portray the weary, tragic hero as he was so sleep-deprived from becoming a new father just before filming began.
Riz Ahmed has wanted to make a Hamlet movie since he was 16.
The 42-year-old actor, plays Danish prince Hamlet in a new adaptation of the play, which relocates the tragedy to modern London, reimagining the royal court as the world of South Asian business dynasties and Riz admitted working on Hamlet has been a dream of his for decades.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: “I was like a lot of teenagers. I was at school going through quite an emotionally raw and turbulent time when an amazing teacher took me under his wing and presented Hamlet to me, and it really reflected how raw and out of place I was feeling at that time. So I forged a close bond with the text and with this character back then. And I decided, really, at the age of 16 or 17: ‘Man, I want to make a movie of this one day.’
“Not least because I saw that there were a lot of interesting plot points in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that would feel outdated in a Western context, but within my community, they’re still part of the lived experience – spirit possession, blood debt, not being able to marry Ophelia because she’s from the wrong family, or even the cultural tradition, which is very much alive and well. In a lot of South Asian communities, marrying your sister-in-law if your brother dies in order to protect the orphans, that’s something that I’ve seen growing up. So I was like, man, stories like this, they belong to everyone.”
Riz also admitted it was easy to play the weary tragic hero Hamlet as he was so sleep deprived from becoming a father just before filming began.
He said: “I mean, honestly, the whole thing was night shoots, and it was so intense… I should also add, I’d just become a father. And so much of this play, so much this story is about fatherhood and stepping into the inheritance of that and the fear of that, the absence of that. I was quite sleep-deprived with a newborn baby and also doing night shoots. It was super intense. So there’s a kind of fever dream quality to the shoot that I think you also see in the film.”
Riz Ahmed’s decades-long Hamlet wish
