Riz Ahmed

Riz Ahmed

Acting
Born 1982-12-01 Wembley, London, England, UK 8 credit(s) Popularity 3
Rizwan Ahmed (born 1 December 1982) is a British actor and rapper. He has received several awards, including an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, and nominations for two Golden Globe Awards and two British Academy Film Awards. In 2017, he was named by Time as one of the most influential people in the world. He also created the TV series Englistan in 2018 for the BBC, which was also his writing debut. After s...
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Biography

Profile information and background.

Rizwan Ahmed (born 1 December 1982) is a British actor and rapper. He has received several awards, including an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award, and nominations for two Golden Globe Awards and two British Academy Film Awards. In 2017, he was named by Time as one of the most influential people in the world. He also created the TV series Englistan in 2018 for the BBC, which was also his writing debut.

After studying acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Ahmed began his acting career with independent films such as The Road to Guantanamo (2006), Shifty (2008), Four Lions (2010), Trishna (2011), and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). He had his break-out role in Nightcrawler (2014), which led to roles in the 2016 big-budget films Jason Bourne and Rogue One. For starring as a young man accused of murder in the HBO miniseries The Night Of (2016), Ahmed won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series. He received another Emmy nomination in the same year for his guest role in Girls. He went on to play Carlton Drake in the superhero film Venom (2018) and a drummer who loses his hearing in the drama film Sound of Metal (2019). The latter earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He produced, co-wrote, and starred in Mogul Mowgli (2020), which earned a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film.

As a rapper, Ahmed is a member of the Swet Shop Boys, and has earned critical acclaim with the hip-hop albums Microscope and Cashmere, and commercial success featuring in the Billboard 200 chart-topping Hamilton Mixtape, with his song "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" winning an MTV Video Music Award. His second studio album, The Long Goodbye, was accompanied by a short film of the same name, which won him the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

Description above from the Wikipedia article Riz Ahmed, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

Main acting credits and shows.

Bait poster
Bait
as Shah Latif
2026-03-25
Saturday Night Live UK poster
Saturday Night Live UK
as Self - Host
2026-03-21
Behind The Mic: The Making of The Harry Potter Full-Cast Audio Editions poster
Behind The Mic: The Making of The Harry Potter Full-Cast Audio Editions
as Himself
2026-02-10
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right poster
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right
as Executive Producer
2024-04-08
The Lateish Show with Mo Gilligan poster
The Lateish Show with Mo Gilligan
as Self
2019-07-19
The Big Narstie Show poster
The Big Narstie Show
as Self
2018-06-29
The OA poster
The OA
as Elias Rahim
2016-12-16
The Night Of poster
The Night Of
as Nasir 'Naz' Khan
2016-07-10

Crew Credits

Directing, writing, production, and other work.

No crew credits available yet.