On Sunday night, TV mini-series Night Of ended its run, during which it drew an audience of seven million viewers weekly across all platforms. The critically acclaimed crime drama showcased a gripping performance by actor and rapper Riz Ahmed as Nasir Khan, the Queens, NY, college student charged with the murder of Andrea Cornish, a young woman he met while driving his dad’s taxi without permission.
The night after the finale aired, on The Late Show, Ahmed chatted with host Stephen Colbert. They didn’t dissect the finale episode given Colbert’s fear of spoilers (he’s a fan who hadn’t seen it yet). But they did chat about Ahmed’s experiences filming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (sans toilet breaks!), and also tapped into a powerful if brief discussion of identity.
Watch video from Ahmed’s Late Show appearance below:
Here’s what Ahmed had to say around four minutes into the video clip:
“When I was growing up, I felt like I had to qualify and say I’m British-Pakistani. But I feel in this day and age, this is what British looks like. It looks like me, like Idris Elba. And hopefully through Nasir Khan, people will see that’s what American can look like as well.”
The actor said more in an interview with The New Yorker about the significance of portraying Night Of ‘s Nasir Khan, who lives with his family in Jackson Heights, Queens:
…after playing several roles that dealt more directly with race and Islam (a young Pakistani man working on Wall Street whose world is disrupted after 9/11, in the excellent “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”; a would-be jihadist in the satire “Four Lions”), he found it refreshing to play a character whose ethnic and religious identities were incidental to the plot, while still being thoughtfully represented. “It’s just nice to have complex characters,” he said. The progression of Hollywood parts for actors of color, he said, works “in stages”: “You start off with stereotypes, then you have stuff that’s on ethnicized terrain but it’s abutting stereotypes, like ‘Four Lions’ or ‘Road to Guantánamo.’ Then you have stuff that’s kind of deracinated, which is cool in a way, like if I play someone named Bob or Jack, but I still look how I look. But there’s maybe something even cooler than that, which is I play someone called Nazir or Jamal or whatever, but it’s not about that, necessarily, without there being any erasure of my background or heritage. It’s just not the focal point, because it’s considered pedestrian. It’s no longer exotic.”
In his career as a rapper, Ahmed has also explored themes of identity and what it means to be English today, most recently via the mixtape Englistan.
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Pavani Yalamanchili is an editor at The Aerogram. Find her on Twitter at @_pavani, and follow The Aerogram at @theaerogram and on Facebook.
