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.

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 the story. I was like a lot of teenagers. I was at school going through quite an emotionally raw and turbulent time when an amazing teacher took me under his wing and presented Hamlet to me, and it really reflected how raw and out of place I was feeling at that time. So I forged a close bond with the text and with this character back then. And I decided, really, at the age of 16 or 17: “Man, I want to make a movie of this one day.” Not least because I realized that there were a lot of interesting plot points in Shakespeare’s Hamlet that would feel outdated in a Western context, but within my community, they’re still part of the lived experience — 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. In a lot of South Asian communities, 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.

And having felt like an outsider, I [found] a place for myself in this play and in this story. So that was when the first spark happened. That was over 20 years ago, and we really started working properly on the idea of an adaptation with Mike Lesslie in 2011. I went to university with him. We did a tour of Shakespeare together, again around Japan, interestingly. We got to know each other through that. And I approached him with this idea. He loved it and we started working on it for about a decade. 10 years in, we’d been through different rounds of development, gone to different studios, they’d taken it on, and different studios had changed their priorities. We’d gotten it back, and we were a bit of an impasse. We knew we had something special, but it wasn’t fully unlocked. And it didn’t really unlock itself until I met Aneil 10 years into the process, after we did The Long Goodbye, and it was after doing The Long Goodbye that I realized: here’s a director who’s worked with a lot of rappers, with a lot of verse and poetry, and has found a way of taking that elevated register, taking a gritty contemporary environment and making it feel elevated and poetic. That’s what he did in The Long Goodbye.

To his credit, what he recognized in this was a propulsive contemporary thriller. Then he unlocked it by saying: “I feel like sometimes Hamlet is performed for people, and I don’t want this to be performed for an audience. I want the audience to experience what he’s experiencing.” He then came up with the idea of getting rid of every scene that Hamlet is not in, and turning it almost into a first-person shooter version of Hamlet. You’re really with him and in his head and feeling what he’s feeling, rather than anything being performed for you.

I noticed that intention, even in the way it was filmed — the winding, extended shots following Hamlet around in his turmoil. It must have felt almost theatrical.

We wanted the freedom of theater with the intimacy of film. And that’s really all the decisions that Stu Bentley, our director of photography, and Aneil Karia made. A lot of our team came off of The Zone of Interest and on that film, that was a 360 environment for the actors to inhabit, so they brought some of that sensibility to what we were doing. What’s interesting is that every one of those decisions was made in order to facilitate an intimacy between the camera and myself, the camera and the other actors, and ultimately, the audience and the characters. There’s a dance taking place between what Aneil’s doing with his camera and what we’re doing as performers. That’s something that runs throughout his work.

Did you shoot in London?

We shot in London and just outside of London… I mean, honestly, the whole thing was night shoots, and it was so intense. Some of it is a blur at this moment when you’re asking me questions. [Laughs.] I should also add, I’d just become a father. And so much of this play, so much this story is about fatherhood and stepping into the inheritance of that and the fear of that, the absence of that. I was quite sleep-deprived with a newborn baby and also doing night shoots. It was super intense. So there’s a kind of fever dream quality to the shoot that I think you also see in the film.

Bless you for doing that with a newborn…

I think these things happen for a reason, right? You’re going to tell a story about fatherhood, the universe is going to make you really look at that.

I want to touch on what you said before about those commonalities between South Asian culture and the plot points of Hamlet. In more detail, why do you think this setting is so ripe for this particular adaptation?

Aneil and all of us wanted to make a Hamlet that felt quite grounded. Even some of the supernatural questions in the original play, it’s just an objective fact that everyone’s seen the ghost — we’ve made that more of a subjective question: “Well, Hamlet’s seen the ghost. Can he trust himself?” You know? Is he having a lapse of judgment or some kind of episode? We wanted to make it feel like this modern thriller. 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, but once you made that decision, lots of other added bonuses started popping up. You start realizing how — because Hamlet is a myth, Shakespeare didn’t create the story of Hamlet, it’s an ancient myth, this story — this myth pops up in all kinds of cultures. The sacred Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita is also about someone paralyzed within action in the middle of a conflict [and] working out whether he can take violent action against his uncles and his cousins.

On the other side, that is a central Hindu text. A millennia-old text, and those are the first words spoken in our adaptation during the funeral rites. So, we started realizing all these echoes and resonances between this Old English text and this ancient Eastern culture, and it just underlines the idea that this story belongs to everyone. Obviously, we’ve spoken about some of those story points. They’re rendered more believable and vivid and real when you set them in this community, because those things [do] happen… We really quickly realized that setting it here in this adaptation brings out the essence and the DNA of Hamlet in a really vivid way, in a way that is sometimes obscured by setting it in a historical Danish palace.

There’s also this added element around corporate greed and the exploitation of unhoused people. What were the conversations like with Michael about where Elsinore comes in?

In the original play, Fortinbras is a character from a neighboring kingdom, Norway, who’s got a land dispute with the Danish royal family. We’ve turned the Fortinbras into a movement of unhoused people who are trying to reclaim their homes, who’ve been evicted by the Elsinore Corporation. Again, our hope is that it just brings the story to life in a really immediate way. We had lots of conversations about that. We wanted to really find that balance of updating the play, but honoring the essence of it.

Because there is a social and societal dimension to Hamlet. It’s about family, and it’s told through family and family dynamics. But we think that broader social context is something that’s actually really important in Hamlet, because Hamlet’s feeling like a lot of people are feeling right now, which is [that] 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. It’s a timeless story.

This screens at Telluride and TIFF. Do you get nervous?

It’s like sending your kid to school or something. You care about this thing, you put so much time and energy and love into this thing, and you’re sharing it with the world. Of course, our hope is that it resonates with people and it connects with people, and it really kind of blows Shakespeare wide open for new audiences, that it allows people to be inspired, to think about it differently. But you have to just let go of what happens now. We know why we made it and now it’s out of our hands. But to answer your question, is it nerve-wracking? Yeah, it’s a bit nerve-racking. [Laughs.]

Do you and Aneil have a relationship now where, if he comes knocking, you’ll always answer?

I’d always work with Aneil — I’m not sure he’d always work with me, because he might have had enough of this guy! [Laughs.] But he’s certainly someone who I’ve got deep love and respect for and a real admiration as an artist. He’s a true artist. He’s not someone who makes decisions for the wrong reasons. He’ll always try and preserve the integrity of his creative vision. Hamlet was 10 years of different drafts and [it was] in a good place, but we could not unlock it until he came along and brought that vision to it. Similarly, he did that with The Long Goodbye. He’s just an incredible artist and one of the most exciting directors coming out of the U.K.

If you were to adapt another Shakespeare play, what would be your next choice?

Man, that’s a really good question… I think Macbeth is incredible and lot of fun. I think there’s been a lot of great Macbeths, actually, so my attention turns to…

…what you could do that hasn’t had enough love yet?

Yeah. It’s a really good question. I’m too young to play this role but I did this play in high school — I really love The Tempest. There’s something so transcendent and otherworldly and magical and quite mysterious [about it] as a work. I love that play.

Riz, what do you have coming up next? Are you allowed to talk about it?

Relay is in cinemas right now. That just opened in the U.S., and it’s going to open in the U.K. in October. It’s a thriller with David McKenzie, a throwback to those classic 1970s thrillers, lots of twists and turns. It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And it’s really a nod to films like The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor… so I’m really proud of that. David McKenzie, he’s always the guy who manages to make those films against the odds. So that’s right now.

I’m just finishing up a TV series for Amazon, [Quarter Life], which is the first thing that I’ve created myself. It’s a real privilege and joy to be able to pick your team, build your family, and birth this vision together, you know? We’re just putting the finishing touches on that.