Rather than representing others, I’m now interested in presenting myself as honestly as possible in ways that even surprise me.
Риз Ахмед называет Bait — мини-сериал The Amazon Prime Video об актёре, который вынужден бороться с вопросами идентичности и неуверенности в себе — своим самым личным проектом.
Выступив соавтором сценария и исполнительным продюсером шоу, Ахмед стремился в первую очередь сократить пропасть между своим «внешним» образом актёра и настоящим «я».
[I have been thinking about this idea] since 2014 or 2015.
It was after “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” was in progress. I felt two things. One, you spend all this time trying to get to a certain place, and when you get there, it doesn’t deal with your deficit of self-love or self-esteem, if you have one, which most of us do. I’ll show my cards and say I do from time to time. That was a realization: You can spend your whole life chasing the love of others, but if you don’t love yourself, that’s nowhere. So what do you do with that?
And the other big thing that made me think I need to try to unpick this knot is this gulf that opened up between how people see you and how you really feel. People think if you’re in “Star Wars,” you’re on a yacht with Han Solo. Actually, I got banned for suspected shoplifting the same week the first press photos from “Star Wars” (2016’s “Rogue One”) came out. I wasn’t shoplifting, right? But I was dressed crazy enough because my washing machine was broken. And somebody told me, “The distance between your public and private self is how much shame you carry.” I thought, Yeah, should I get therapy or make a TV show about that? (Laughs).
В результате, многие сцены Bait не просто взяты из опыта Ахмеда — они буквально копируют реальность, до мелочей.
My character has a panic attack at the end of Episode 1 at a music venue in London. That happened to me at that music venue on that stage in London. The same place, same venue, same thing.
My character gets jumped when he’s a kid, beaten up and attacked in the railway overpass in a park that is the exact place where that happened to me. We went back and filmed it there. My character is approached by MI5 to help work with it. I was approached by MI5 after gaining some notoriety as an actor. They said, “It helps us out with messaging.” I did not return the call, but that happened to me on three different occasions.
As an actor, you can hide behind things. And if you’re trying to stretch culture, you can do that by flipping the casting in stories that would’ve existed anyway. But the one kind of role that I’d never been offered, because it didn’t exist, was someone like me. Someone like Dev Patel. Someone like Himesh Patel. Those roles haven’t really existed. So I want to add that to the pantheon of our stories.
Как выразился сам Ахмед, таким образом он снимает маску перед зрителем параллельно с персонажем и прорабатывает детские травмы гораздо выгодней, чем с психологом.
#tv | #bait