Riz Ahmed Says He Felt Like an ‘Outsider’ Growing Up, Just Like His Modern New “Hamlet” (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Riz Ahmed takes on the titular role in Hamlet, director Aneil Karia’s big-screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy debuting in theaters April 10

• Discovering the play in high school, Ahmed tells PEOPLE he connected with a character who felt like “as much of an outsider as I did at that time”

• By setting Hamlet in modern-day London, Ahmed similarly hopes to “take audiences to a new place and have them recognize themselves there”

Riz Ahmed has plenty in common with a centuries-old Danish prince.

The British actor-filmmaker, 43, connected with William Shakespeare’s Hamlet long before embodying the titular figure in director Aneil Karia’s buzzy new screen adaptation of the tragic play.

“I had a really inspirational English teacher who gave it to me,” Ahmed tells PEOPLE of the classic, published at the turn of the 17th century. “And actually, I found a character, the heart of this play, that just feels as much of an outsider as I did at that time.”

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He adds with a laugh, “And as much of an outsider as I think many of us feel right now, right? I think the central question of the play is, ‘Am I losing my mind or has the world gone crazy?’ And I think we are feeling that way.”

Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie’s Hamlet swaps Denmark castles for modern-day, multicultural London, with Ahmed’s titular character, for example, delivering the iconic “To be or not to be” soliloquy while driving on a high-speed highway.

The Oscar winner acknowledges that “many people” have a block with Shakespeare’s work, that it “doesn’t belong to me and I don’t belong in it and it’s just a bit stuffy and alien and I’m on the outside of it.”

But “as [critic] Roger Ebert would put it, movies and storytelling are an empathy engine,” he adds. “It’s exciting to me to take audiences to a new place and have them recognize themselves there.”

As with his newfound Hamlet obsession in high school, “I’ve recognized myself in a place I would at least have expected to,” continues Ahmed. “There’s something really important and powerful about that, particularly a time when we’re so hung up on everything that separates us and how we’re different from one another, you know?”

Shakespeare’s themes might be a few centuries old, but in a modern context they still generate that empathy, as Ahmed points out. “We just wanted to make something that didn’t feel like a museum piece,” he says of the Hamlet movie.

Developing it as lead actor and producer, he adds, “suddenly we’re in this position where in order to keep this canonical, British text alive, this Western text alive. We actually have to pass the baton in terms of where it’s set. And only then can it actually feel grounded and real.”

Following a premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, Hamlet is in theaters Friday, April 10. It costars Morfydd Clark, Joe Alwyn, Sheeba Chaddha, Avijit Dutt, Art Malik, Timothy Spall and more.

Ahmed’s other projects include leading British limited series Bait (now streaming on Prime Video) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger with Tom Cruise in theaters Oct. 2.

Read the original article on People