Riz Ahmed in Aneil Karia's 'Hamlet.' TIFF Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment If you watch Aneil Karia's Hamlet and are, too, stunned by the authenticity of Riz Ahmed's portrayal of a bleary-eyed and tormented protagonist, you should know it wasn't entirely fake. "I'd just become a father," the British actor tells The Hollywood Reporter about the six-week night shoot across London in late 2023. "I was quite sleep-deprived with a newborn baby... it was super intense," he laughs. "So there's a kind of fever dream quality to the shoot that I think you also see in the film." Ahmed's grief-stricken performance anchors Karia and scriptwriter Michael Lesslie's contemporary take on Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark. The film begins with our protagonist, Ahmed, carrying out his late father's funeral rites while verses are read from an ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. In modern London, we follow an erratic Hamlet reckoning with his uncle's decision to marry his mother, his sanity dwindling. Related Stories Movies Guillermo Del Toro's 'Frankenstein' Is a Monster Made in Canada Movies 'Christy' Review: Sydney Sweeney Throws a Convincing Enough Punch, but David Michôd's Boxing Movie Never Transcends Bio-Drama Formula Karia and Lesslie hit the crucial plot points of Hamlet and introduce a current-day twist by having the fictional Danish castle Elsinore act as the company title for his family's property business, which faces scrutiny over forced evictions. Fortinbras, a movement of unhoused youths, lay bare the crimes of his uncle Claudius, played by Art Malik. Joe Alwyn stars as Laertes and Morfydd Clark is Ophelia, while Timothy Spall and Sheeba Chaddha feature as Polonius and Gertrude, respectively. "Aneil and all of us wanted to make a Hamlet that felt quite grounded," says Ahmed, known for his roles in Nightcrawler (2014), Rogue One (2016), Sound of Metal (2019), and more recently, his Academy Award-winning short with frequent collaborator Karia, The Long Goodbye (2020). "We needed to follow the real-world logic. If I'm playing Hamlet, who's going to be my family? It was as simple as that." Soon, however, the director and his star found "added bonuses" kept popping up that made a South Asian community the perfect setting for a present-day Hamlet. "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," explains Ahmed. "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." Ahmed takes THR through his Hamlet, set to premiere in Telluride and TIFF. He discusses finding inspiration in a Japanese production of the play, why his turbulent experience as a teenager led him to forge a "close bond" with the text and the parallels between Hamlet's journey and our current world chaos: "The old rules seem to be getting torn up right in front of our eyes and we're powerless about it, and we're being gaslit about it, but then we're also complicit in it. That's exactly how Hamlet feels." Do you remember when you first saw Hamlet and how formative an experience that was? That's such a good question. Let me just think and make sure that I've got this right... Okay, so I've had a close relationship with the text since I was about 17, so I knew the play well, and was obsessed with it for a while. If I'm not mistaken, I don't think I actually saw a full production of it until I was at drama school. The drama school training that I had was classical acting. It was just Shakespeare. And what I saw was a Japanese production of Hamlet directed by the incredible Japanese master, [Yukio] Ninagawa. Ninagawa uses visual spectacle and elaborate visual metaphors to bring out the inner life of the play. It's very physical, actually, given that he's performing for a global audience. He tours, but [it's] also for a Japanese audience. That was really interesting to me, because I had a very close relationship to the words. I was writing rap lyrics and poetry all through my teens and 20s, and to this day. So my relationship with it had been more verbal and lyrical, and seeing a production that was so ardently about the physical experience of Hamlet... that really left a mark on me. I think it's influenced the film that we've created here because I think both Aneil and I believe that Hamlet's primarily about someone having a physical experience [in reaction] to the pressures around him, rather than someone who's having an intellectual experience. You and Aneil are friends, of course, and saw such huge success with The Long Goodbye. Did he approach you with an adaptation of Hamlet? How did it come about? It depends when you want to start t