Riz Ahmed has opened up about a health scare he experienced while filming 2016’s Rogue One that threatened to derail his life and career.
The Oscar winner rose to fame in the 2010s thanks to films such as Four Lions and Nightcrawler, eventually being cast as pilot Bodhi Rook in the first Star Wars spin-off. While appearing on the Podcrushed podcast, he detailed what happened to him over the course of filming.
“Around the time of taking on (2019 drama) Sound of Metal, I had had a very intense kind of health-related experience myself,” he said.
“Basically, I was in the middle of filming (Rogue One), and my body kind of gave up on me. I was extremely exhausted. I was hospitalised for a brief period, and I really tried to regain my strength. I was building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually. For a minute, I was like, ‘Am I ever going to get my life back?’
The actor did not go into specifics on the condition, only mentioning that “it really wasn’t clear” as to the cause, and describing it as “something very silent and very intense [that] happened to me, and I wasn’t getting better quickly”.
Ahmed explained that while suffering from the ailment, he experienced a “deep kind of grief and fear and terror, and yet also a kind of tremendous kind of liberation and gratitude.
“You don’t control a single thing” he explained. “You don’t even control your body. Then, in moments of kind of trippy clarity and in the darkness, I realized, then everything you have is a gift”.
The actor’s career would go on from strength to strength, winning an Oscar in 2022 for his short film The Long Goodbye, as well as appearing in indie hit Mogul Mowgli and this year’s Wes Anderson comedy The Phoenician Scheme.
Recently, Ahmed added his name alongside more than 300 public figures in an open letter urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “end UK complicity” in Gaza.
