Names: Riz Ahmed and Guz Khan
Notable past credits: Ahmed is the Oscar-winning actor and writer, known for “The Night Of,” “Sound of Metal,” “The Long Goodbye” and more. Khan is a comedian and actor, who created and starred in the BBC series “Man Like Mobeen.”
Sundance project: “Bait,” a TV series set to release on Prime Video on March 25. Written by Ahmed, the show follows Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose life is turned upside down by an audition to be the next James Bond.
The show’s Sundance premiere screened the first three episodes of the six-episode series, which Ahmed describes as “interesting.”
You May Also Like
“Laughs came in places I didn’t expect and other laughs didn’t come, and that made me sad. Why aren’t you laughing start to finish?” he deadpans.
“Compared to a lot of screenings that I’ve been to for comedy, it was a lot, man,” Khan tells him. “And some of it is very U.K., and the vernacular is very different and people, it’s very specific. And that’s about as happy as you can be, mate. Lovely job.”
“The inspiration was this feeling that a lot of us have, which is that sometimes life feels like one big audition,” Ahmed explains of the series. “You’re always trying to prove yourself to people and people you don’t know, strangers online or people in your past, or prove yourself to you. And that can be exhausting. It can drive you crazy and it can push you to the edges of your relationships and your family. And that’s what the show’s about.”
His own experiences with auditions have left their mark.
“I’m scarred by most of them, to be honest,” he says. “I mean, auditioning is something that can be quite brutal and so often you’re just not right energetically for it, it doesn’t matter how well you perform it. I was never very good at auditioning. My ‘Star Wars’ audition, I sent in 16 different tapes for the same scene. The director made a mistake of giving me their email address, and so I just didn’t stop. Next day I didn’t hear, I just sent another three. It was so insane. I think on the ‘Star Wars’ DVD extras, they’ve got them.”
“I think the last physical audition I went to, it was with a casting director that I knew. So that always makes things much easier when you know an individual,” Khan says. “But I remember just looking at the page that was in front of me and looking back at her and the other people that were there and I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t think this is going to go very well, shall we just get on?’ Didn’t get the job. And I decided after that, man, for as long as we’ve been in the game, especially as a comedic actor, there’s a body of work out there. You can kind of see what we do and if it’s something that you’d like to collaborate on and talk about, that’s better for me. I’m so s–t at auditions. Who knows? You’re sitting in front of people you’ve never really met before. What do you want? I don’t know what you want.”
As for who is the duo’s pick to be the next James Bond?
“I think we should do it as a double act,” Ahmed says. “It would be like ‘Bad Boys,’ or ‘Lethal Weapon.’”
“So basically what we want to make, which I completely agree with you on, is ‘Bad Boys,’” Khan says.
“No, it would be 007. We’d say all the lines together at the same time,” Ahmed says. “Double the power.”
