Riz Ahmed has played all kinds of roles in his career, including a corporate fixer, a tech millionaire, and even a villain bent on using aliens to get stronger. However, the actor’s real life was equally surprising and exciting.
In a recent interview, the actor spoke about three attempts to recruit him to become a spy.
Riz Ahmed almost joined the intelligence service
While speaking about his latest project, Relay, Riz Ahmed revealed that there were three attempts to recruit him into the Secret Service. Speaking to Mehdi Hassan on his social media platform, the Venom actor said that even a top executive of a media company was among the people who tried to recruit him.“Well, it’s happened three different times, and they’re all a little bit silly, and that’s what I mean by it, it’s just comedy in nature,” he explained. He also revealed that he was strangled the first time it happened.When asked for more details, he said: “One of them was when I came back from my first film, The Road to Guantanamo. We landed at Luton Airport to celebrate. They took me into a side room, put me in an armlock, threatened to break my arm, took my phone, pretended to punch buttons, accidentally changed the language to Danish, and then sort of said to me: ‘Have you become an actor to promote the Islamic struggle?’He added that they then asked him if he wanted to monitor the events for them, but he refused.
The second time, he said, a family friend called him. The third attempt was made by a high-ranking executive in a media company, which surprised him. Speaking further about it, the actor joked that if he had actually become a federal agent, it would have been a “sick biopic.”
