The Subversive Brilliance of Riz Ahmed's "Bait"

For the past 15-odd years, the actor and rapper Riz Ahmed has been infiltrating popular culture like a covert operative: now a radicalized Muslim Brit from South Yorkshire, now an unhoused Los Angeles drifter, a rebel star pilot, an avant-metal drummer—disappearing into each role like a decade-embedded sleeper agent, as convincing with a Queens accent as he is speaking the King’s, and never less than riveting onscreen. As he proved in last year’s espionage thriller *Relay,* this London-born British Pakistani may be the sole human being able to credibly move unnoticed through New York City’s streets and subways and be utterly magnetic to the viewer while doing so. His watchful eyes, wiry frame, and feline grace make the act of crossing a street look cool AF: a superstar secret agent. The question isn’t whether Ahmed could be the next James Bond, but whether that’d be just too on the nose.  So in a sense, Ahmed’s new Amazon Prime showbiz satire [*Bait*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVjqDNZeMx0) springs from a premise that feels barely fictional: that Ahmed, as London-born actor Shah Latif, is under consideration as the new 007—much to the delight, panic, resentment, and even mortal peril of his extended family of London Muslims. In a sense, *Bait* is a look behind Ahmed’s “legend,” the fabricated bio a spy uses when undercover, one informed by the actor’s 20-year struggle toward global acclaim.  The show is *very* well made: full of hilariously believable intra-familial squabbles, brisk and punchy direction, public confrontations and private breakdowns, and a vivid sense of contemporary London. “Nobody needs a Muslim Uber, bro,” Shah tells his car-service entrepreneur brother Zulfi. “Uber in London is already Muslim.” Shah’s ex, a political journalist, asks, “Isn’t it more racist to be killing yourself to play a white neo-colonial MI6 agent?” to which he counters, “But if I played him, he wouldn’t be white, would he?” and she snaps back: “But *you* would be.”  Unlike his striving character Shah, Ahmed created, produced, and wrote *Bait* after rising to the summit of his profession, which he did through immersion and subversion, by being better than anyone else at being other people. The graduate of both Oxford and the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama has long shown a blazing intelligence in his acting and choice of roles, but his stroke of genius with this show is a premise that enables him to channel real-life experiences as a Wembley-raised Muslim actor, rapper, and rising star and point them all directly at a whole nexus of post-Brexit Trump-era anxieties about race, masculinity, religious freedom, and national identity.  Read now: [https://www.playboy.com/read/entertainment/the-subversive-brilliance-of-riz-ahmeds-bait](https://www.playboy.com/read/entertainment/the-subversive-brilliance-of-riz-ahmeds-bait)