British Pakistani actor, rapper and activist, Riz Ahmed, stars in Mogul Mowgli - the story of a British Pakistani rapper on the cusp of his first world tour, who is struck down by an illness that threatens to derail his big break.
This is not my house and this is not my window, but the view from this window is foliage, green, there's a fig tree, there's a lemon tree. I'm renting a house while I'm in LA and it's my last 10 days here before I go back to London, where the view out my window will probably be a gigantic building site, because I've heard they started building a massive office block out my window.
I came out to LA to do a project in September. I was only going to be here for two and a half months. Then I needed to be here for photo shoots to promote the film, and then there was the Covid lockdown. Then, for my album live stream [The Long Goodbye], we found a really great venue for that in San Francisco and then, after the Oscar nomination [for Sound of Metal currently showing on Amazon Prime], they said if you go back to London, you can't come back for the Oscars. So I basically found myself having to extend for work reasons and now I've been here for nine months, which is crazy. What an unpredictable year. I have not stayed in the same place for more than two weeks. It's been incredibly draining.
I always miss home when I'm away from London and then as soon as I go back I'm like, "F***, the weather is miserable." I think it's difficult with cities like London and New York, so much of what's special about them was taken away in Covid, whereas somewhere like Los Angeles is already a very socially distanced place and the weather doesn't go away. Whereas in London, you're not there for the weather, you're there for the culture, for the people, for the connection and if that gets taken away, it's trickier. So I feel very lucky in a way that I'll be going back at a time when things have opened up again. I always miss it because I think it has a very special energy. It's the most global city in the world, I think, unquestionably. And I think that in itself is such a testament to what the world could be.
Mogul Mowgli, which is set in London, is very personal. [Director] Bassam [Tariq] is investing in trying to create his own cinematic grammar for our experience as children of immigrants, as people who've grown up around stories and mythology, and have a heritage of Asian and Islamic art; taking inspiration of Mughal miniatures and Islamic art and some of the mythology that infuses our worldview from a young age in our culture. Mogul Mowgli is much more personal in that I co-wrote it and it's an attempt to kind of put up an experience on the screen that really hasn't been shown before.
