Riz Ahmed is an Academy Award winning multi-hyphenate, excelling in his unique blend of critically acclaimed acting, producing, writing and creating music.

Ahmed won the 2022 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film alongside director Aneil Karia for the short film “The Long Goodbye,” a visual accompaniment to his universally acclaimed 2020 solo album of
the same name. The short film, which Ahmed co-created and wrote, was also named British/Irish Short Film of the Year also won Best Short Film at the London Critics’ Circle and British Independent Film.

This summer, Ahmed starred in Wes Anderson’s, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, alongside Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch, and will lead the thriller RELAY, alongside Lily James and Sam Worthington. The latter premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival to widespread critical praise.

Next up, Ahmed will write, produce, and star in a new as-yet-untitled half-hour comedy series for Amazon Prime Video. The series will depict the struggles of aspiring actor Shah Latif (played by Ahmed), whose life
takes a surreal turn as he navigates an existential crisis and a bizarre conspiracy. The series will air in late 2025.

Ahmed is in currently in production on an untitled Alejandro G. Iñárritu film for Warner Bros, starring opposite Tom Cruise. The film is scheduled to be released on October 2, 2026.

On the horizon, he will star in a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, HAMLET, reteaming with Karia. Ahmed will play the titular character, haunted by his father’s ghost and driven to increasingly unstable heights. Moving from elite London to the city’s underground, from Hindu temples to homeless tent cities, he goes to rash and violent lengths to avenge his father’s murder, ultimately questioning his own role in the family’s corruption.

In 2023, he starred in Apple’s FINGERNAILS, opposite Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White. Ahmed voiced one of the lead roles in Netflix’s Oscar nominated animation, NIMONA, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Ahmed was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe Award and SAG Award for his lead performance in the 2021 film, SOUND OF METAL. He won the National Board of Review, IFP Gotham Award and Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, as well as more than fourteen leading critics groups.The film, directed by Darius Marder, follows a professional drummer’s descent into unexpected hearing loss. It originally premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival to career-topping performance reviews,
which led to the acquisition by Amazon Films.

Ahmed became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors following the explosive success of HBO’s THE NIGHT OF (written and created by the legendary Steven Zaillan), for which he won an Emmy Award, and was Golden Globe and SAG Award nominated.

Past feature films credits include Disney’s ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY, Jacques Audiard’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS, Sony/Marvel’s VENOM and Amazon Studio's ENCOUNTER. He first garnered industry attention in festival favorites FOUR LIONS and NIGHTCRAWLER.

Ahmed’s award-winning production company, Left Handed Films, has a first-look TV deal with Amazon Studio. Left Handed Films produced Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s FLEE, which made history as the first movie to earn Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and International Feature.Left Handed Films executive produced JOYLAND, the first Pakistani film to play at the Cannes Film Festival and to be shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar. Initially banned in its home country for its LGBTQ+ themes, JOYLAND is a visually radiant, subversive family drama set in the bustling megacity of Lahore. It won the Indie Spirit Award for Best International Film in 2023.

Upcoming Left Handed projects include EXIT WEST, the best-seller by Mohsin Hamid for Netflix in partnership with the Obamas' Higher Ground Productions and Joe and Anthony Russo's AGBO. As a musician, Ahmed's journey has spanned two decades across battle rap, techno, artistic residencies, a successful American band Swet Shop Boys, and most recently, his critically-acclaimed, award-winning 2020 solo album “The Long Goodbye.”

In June 2021, Ahmed launched a multi-layered initiative for Muslim representation in media, in partnership with the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the Ford Foundation and Pillars Fund. Powered by USC Annenberg’s latest study on Muslim representation in media — which found that less than 10% of top grossing films from 2017-2019 had a Muslim character on screen, with less than 2% of those characters having speaking roles — the coalition created the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion, as well as the Pillars Artist Fellowship, offering selected grantees an unrestricted award of $25,000.