Riz Ahmed

“'Post 9/11 Blues' is an observational satire about the surreal circus of fear at that time. It's a generational thing.”

“Hollywood is an image. We project these fantasies on to it, but people are just people.”

“I think that with piracy and tighter funds being around, people are realising that the game to play is to try and win people's respect with bold film making and then win a special place in people's collections, rather than just having the biggest opening weekends.”

“You can read a character that feels amazing, but if the world around it and all the writing around it - even the way the stage descriptions are written - don't feel just right, then you know there's no point in doing the project. No character is ever bigger than the whole film.”

“Whether you look at 'Glee' and its normalization of gay identity or you look at the work of Martin Scorsese and the Italian-American community, American culture is able to take these stories, which are seen as marginalized, and just turn them into American stories. And you don't think twice about it.”

“I'm not in a 'starry' position to be able to pick and choose, but I am interested in telling stories of substance with great directors - that's my only guiding principle.”

“I'm always trying to slip out of those labels everyone tries to put round your neck. We all have multiple selves.”

“Anyone driving great social change, willingly or not, is going to be a fascinating contradictory mix of idealism and ego.”

“I think that in an Internet age, content is content. As long as you can stand up on the merits of what you're doing right at that moment and aren't just relying on your success in doing something else, it's all good; people will respect you.”

“Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.”

“I remember, growing up, you didn't wear an England shirt. The English flag was very much - and still is, to some extent - associated with the far-right movements of the 1980s that I grew up around.”

“Reshoots are par for the course on any film. For me, I kind of love it because, as an actor, you always feel that there was a way you could have done it differently. Being able to go back and do some stuff again is always a blessing in my eyes.”

“My music is a very personal reflection of me, whereas, acting a role, that's a reflection of another character.”

“My parents, man, they're just the most loving, encouraging... They're like those people who define themselves through their role as parents before people in their own rights.”

“I've been very lucky to have played a variety of characters, and they weren't defined by their race.”

“No one's of Pakistani origin in any British show. That's why every actor of color is here working in the States. It's true.”

“There's this assumption that as an actor, Hollywood is always the end point, but I never thought along those lines.”

“The music I make and the process of acting, for me, are both about trying to understand people and get inside what makes us tick. That's the main thing that excites me. Our sense of who we really are and what drives us.”

“I don't think any of us like to be reduced to just one label.”

“I like the idea of being caught between things, always being a bit of an outsider, having an outside eye on things - almost like a Shakespearean fool.”