Photographed by David Needleman
by
Tatiana Siegel
January 19, 2021, 6:00am PST
With his buzzy performance in 'Sound of Metal' — which required him to learn sign language and drumming — plus a new wife and a booming company, the soft-spoken actor and rapper is having his loudest year yet.
Back in summer 2018, Riz Ahmed was preparing for a classroom scene for his latest film,
Sound of Metal, and his American Sign Language coach, Jeremy Lee Stone, was becoming increasingly annoyed. Stone had worked with the actor for the better part of a year, teaching him ASL for the role of Ruben, a rock drummer whose life begins to spiral out of control when he loses his hearing. This, however, was his first day on the Massachusetts set, and he hadn't seen his star pupil in months. Stone made a "voices off" sign, and Ahmed was expected to reciprocate with an identical sign. But Ahmed sat defiantly, refusing to sign, and "it boiled my blood," Stone recalls. After all, the actor was well beyond fluent in ASL by that point. And then it hit Stone. Ruben the character was not yet fluent. "I realized, in that moment, I'm not speaking to Riz," Stone recalls. "There was no Riz. He was fully Ruben in that moment."