A Quote by Riz Ahmed
I never thought acting would be a realistic job for me. Because, quite frankly, I didn't see people who looked like me doing it. I quickly realized, that's all the more reason to try.
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People always ask me, Do you ever think you'll wake up one morning and not be funny? That thought would never occur to me--it's an odd thought and not realistic. Because funny and me are not separate. We're one.
I believe the doctrine of election, because I am quite sure that if God had not chosen me I should never have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chosen me afterwards; and he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love.
I started acting when I was five years old. I found it randomly, through listening to my brother study monologues. I auditorally started memorizing them for no reason, and started repeating them to anyone who would listen to me. And then, I begged my mom to let me do whatever that meant because I couldn't put into words exactly what that meant. It just meant me happy. And then, when I was 11 years old, I realized what I was doing and I looked to my mom and said, "Can I make this something I can do for the rest of my life?" She was like, "Yeah, sure, if you want to." And I was like, "Okay, great! I think I might want to do this forever."
I think the only reason I've had the career life that I've had is that someone told me some secrets early on about living. You can do the very best you can when you're very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That's sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that's a job I could be proud of. It's changed my life learning that, and it's made me better at what I do.
I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable.
It's really cool to see how many people try to imitate me or wear my stuff. I get a lot of Instagram videos of people doing my entrance. I think that's so cool. To see the variety of people, little girls, guys, doing it. I never really thought that would happen. It's amazing.
When I started doing advertisements, I really enjoyed the whole process of shooting, and I realised that I could do the little bit of acting required quite easily. My directors also told me that I have a flair for acting and that I should polish it and try for films. Then I thought I probably had it in me - why not give it a shot?
Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me.
The only reason I'm acting in films I direct is to get the money to make them, quite frankly, it's not what I'm interested in doing.
People asked me, 'Why aren't you doing something more important?' When I was doing well in the D-League, they were like, 'Why can't you get an NBA job? Or a college job?' I don't think people thought much of what I was doing. That's fine. I was learning. Not just X's and O's, but team dynamics.
I suppose the best advice I ever got, frankly the advice that changed my life, came from my uncle who told me to go to drama school and study acting instead of taking a job, because he said the job would always be there.
I really do feel like I'm doing what the people that elected me in the first place wanted me to do. I'm not doing it in the same fashion they thought, or that I thought, when I ran for office in 2010. But I will be doing what they wanted me to do, and that is to try to fix Washington.
Life was tough for me. When I was a kid, nobody played with me because they thought I looked ugly with my extra thumb. It pained me. So once I thought of getting it surgically removed. But I didn't. Slowly, I realized that the exterior is not the criterion for love and success.
I never thought I had it in me to be an actor. There is so much more to the job than acting. But my parents gave me confidence.
Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that.
Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.
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