Lifestyle
Riz Ahmed is his own worst critic. His new show ‘Bait’ explores that
Riz Ahmed, shown here in December 2025, won an Academy Award in 2022 for his life action short film, The Long Goodbye.
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Actor Riz Ahmed admits to being his own worst critic.
“I remember waking up in the middle of the night, two years after I wrapped on [the 2016 series] The Night Of, and going to the mirror and redoing scenes that the whole world had already seen,” he says. “I’d already been handed awards for this performance, [but] I was like, no, I gotta get it right.”
That energy — what Ahmed refers to as “chasing acceptance and running away from your own inner critic” — runs through his new Prime Video series Bait. The series, which Ahmed wrote and stars in, focuses on a struggling British Pakistani actor named Shah who lands an audition to be the next James Bond. When word gets out, and the internet goes wild. Suddenly, Shah’s life starts to resemble the character he’s auditioning to play — except he’s chasing acceptance instead of a villain.
“[Showrunner Ben Karlin and I] felt, early on in the show, you needed to see just how mean Shah’s inner voice can be about him,” Ahmed says. “I think actually there’s a lot of Shah in all of us, more than we like to admit. … The gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge.”
Ahmed says the show’s title has multiple layers and meanings. In British slang, “bait” refers to being blatant and attention-seeking. It can also refer to online trolling. In Arabic and Hebrew, it means home, while in Urdu, it’s a term for loyalty.
“Of course, there’s a big spy-thriller element to our show, and bait is something that is used as part of a trap,” Ahmed says. “So it’s a weird thing where only in retrospect we realize like, ‘oh my God, we accidentally stumbled on the perfect title for this that actually communicates the entire layer cake of this show.’ It is all those flavors and the word ‘bait’ means all those things.”
Interview highlights
On what James Bond represents in Bait
The show isn’t really about James Bond, but James Bond is a very important symbol because he is the ultimate symbol of success. As an actor he is the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. And yet for any of us, he’s this archetype of decisiveness, desirability, of being in control, being unflappable, of being invulnerable. And so I wanted the character of James Bond to serve as this symbol of aspiration, this unattainable kind of self that Shah is hunting down almost. And in chasing this symbol, is he abandoning himself? Is he abandoning where he’s from? Is he abandoning his family? Has he forgotten who he really is? …
I think that that’s something that we all kind of go through. We’re often pulled between the people we were and the people that we want to be. And actually the healthy equilibrium is probably somewhere in the middle. Probably that thing you want to, is like an attempt to escape yourself. And that thing that you were is maybe a version of yourself that you need to evolve out of.
Guz Khan and Riz Ahmed star in the Prime Video series Bait.
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On playing with different genres in Bait
We try and flip the series the whole time. There’s a spy-thriller episode, there’s romantic comedy, there’s kind of a surreal episode, there is one that’s almost like the Bond gala, like James Bond turns up at … [a] black-tie event and hijinks ensues. We’ve got that. We got all these different flavors and we’ve got an Eid episode as well. … We’re very deliberately trying to layer in and thread multiple different genres, because honestly, I feel like my life takes place in different genres. I feel that right now I’m here, lucky me, you know pretending to be all clever, talking to you guys on Fresh Air and I’m gonna walk outside and slip on a banana peel and fall flat on my face and suddenly I’m in a slapstick, you know?
We wanted to have that multiplicity, that tonal whiplash, because honestly that’s just what I enjoy and I felt like if I can make something that’s a full meal — that is a romance and a spy thriller and a family drama … but overall a comedy — then I could also just solve a very personal problem, which is me and my wife squabbling over what we’re going to watch.
On working with Patrick Stewart in Bait
I don’t want to give anything away. I guess I’ll just say that working with him showed me your art can kind of only be as big as your heart is, if that doesn’t sound too corny. Like, you have to have a capacity for such receptivity, humility, generosity, and empathy in order to kind of be an artist of that stature and at that level. … He was just such a pro and such a gentleman and I’ll really cherish that experience.
On discovering Hamlet as a British Pakistani teen
I am like many people. I felt like Shakespeare is the epitome of everything I’m on the outside of. It doesn’t belong to me. It’s stuffy. It is elitist. I got a government-assisted place to a private school where I felt like an outsider for many different reasons. And I was lucky enough to have an English teacher … who [was] a white, Jewish middle-aged man from a different place in the U.K. I thought we had nothing in common, but he spoke fluent Punjabi, and he brought me Hamlet and said, “This thing, this story, this character, it’s at the heart of the establishment that you feel so alienated from in many ways. But have a read of it? You might recognize yourself in this character.”
And I did, like millions of people have, right? Hamlet being a character who feels out of place. Hamlet himself feels like an outsider. He feels like he doesn’t belong, like no one understands. … And it was then, at the age of 17, that I very precociously had the idea that, “Man, I wanna make a movie of this one day.”
On starring in a new adaptation of Hamlet
Hamlet is a story and it’s character who is grieving the illusion that the world was ever a fair place. And I think that’s how we’re all feeling now. We’re all grieving and reeling from this realization that “OK, I knew the world is unfair, but now the shameless brazen unfairness of it is just kind of laid bare.” … The part that we were struggling to unlock is: How do you not make this feel just like a Shakespeare performance, and a poetry recital? How do you not make this feel like a kind of self-congratulatory, like “actor wants to take on the classic”?
It really took us meeting Aneil Karia, the director. It was after I collaborated with him on the short film, The Long Goodbye, for which he won an Oscar, that I was like, “Oh, I think we know how to do this. We need a director who’s worked a lot in rap music videos. We need a director who can render poetry in a very raw way and give us raw action in a poetic way.” … We had a long conversation about how this has to feel like music.
On how his background as an MC helped with the Shakespeare verse
One thing that [Shakespeare] played with all the time was rhythm. Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. And so, in the same way that when I listen to some of my favorite rappers’ new songs, I don’t know what they say the first-time around, but I am totally wrapped. I’m totally leaning in, I’m engaged. I feel it emotionally. It’s the same way. Your first experience of this thing is supposed to be like music. You didn’t catch all of the words, but that word there felt weird enough to make you sit up. And what you’re supposed to do is receive an electric charge of rhythm and melody and musicality, just like rap music. But that’s not the actual experience of these plays. So I wish more people spoke about Shakespeare in that way. Because, to me, it is much more like music than it is an English class.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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