Poll one hundred actors who grew up in Britain, and odds are that 80 of them once dreamed of playing James Bond. But in Bait, Riz Ahmed’s tremendous new TV genre-blend—really, this show is impossible to pin down: it’s part madcap-psychodrama, part meta-satire, part espionage-thriller, all surging with adrenaline a la Uncut Gems—the double-O dream becomes a nightmare for Ahmed’s Shah Latif, a hapless British-Pakistani actor from London.
“It’s a real mixed bag,” Ahmed tells GQ of the series. “It’s comedy. It’s also trying to look at some emotional things. It’s about family, it’s about ambition, it’s about trying to belong.”
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Riz Ahmed — and Riz Ahmed — in Bait.
Courtesy of Prime
The series, which premieres at Sundance later this month and hits Prime Video on March 25, opens with Shah’s tuxedoed Bond screen test. It’s a captivating cold open in which Ahmed—who also wrote and produced Bait—exudes all of the debonair refinement, cocksure confidence and, well, rizz, that the UK bookies once predicted he might bring to the role IRL. (“I think, to be fair, probably 10,000 different people’s names have been associated with [Bond],” says Ahmed.) But then, just as it looks like Shah is going to bring it home, disaster strikes: he forgets his lines, and leaves the studio in a dejected slump, having added another notch on a belt of failures longer than an MI6 agent’s list of false identities.
Nonetheless, a lifeline emerges. While heading out of the audition, Shah catches the lens of a lurking paparazzo. The resultant photos inspire a storm of public speculation around the actor, and as far as the public are concerned, he becomes Bond-elect overnight. The excitement around his potential casting, not least driven by TikTokkers thrilled by the prospect of a first non-white Bond, earns the actor a second chance to test.
At first, all seems grand. Shah’s stock skyrockets, and it seems like he’ll finally live up to the potential he showed when he first broke out a decade prior. (Nonetheless, people in the street— white people, usually—still mistake him for Dev Patel.) And then a severed pig’s head is thrown through his Muslim parents’ window, signalling the racist backlash to come. From then on, Shah’s mind slowly unravels, a process accelerated by his perilous lack of self-confidence. The show is a darkly funny, sometimes sad, whip-smart urban odyssey that asks questions of cultural identity, assimilation, identity politics, masculinity, class, and all of the intersections therein.