In 'Bait,' Riz Ahmed Reckons with His Own Fame

In Bait, Riz Ahmed plays Shah Latif, a struggling actor more obsessed with gaining fame than with doing the work necessary to earn it. In the series’ opening scene, Shah blows an audition to play Bond, but sneaks out the front door and is snapped by paparazzi, fueling rumors that he could be the next 007.

Those rumors quickly incur backlash and a sort of low-level internet fame — enough for his agent, Felicia (Weruche Opia), to secure him another audition. But they also elicit a torrent of negative attention: trolls throw a pig’s head through the window of his parents’ house. Nevertheless, Shah persists, recruiting his cousin Zilfi (Guz Khan) — a cab driver with aspirations of owning his own fleet — to help him navigate the PR whirlwind his career soon becomes. As Shah gets closer to the audition, his ego creates mounting tension within his family, culminating in a series of magical realist sequences involving a pig’s head that speaks to Shah in the voice of Patrick Stewart, a sketchy security professional played by Rafe Spall, and an extended, unsettling encounter with Shah’s ex-girlfriend, Yasmin (Ritu Arya).

Mostly, though, the six-episode series — created and written by Ahmed — is Ahmed’s attempt to wrestle with his own fame: what it means to succeed in an industry run by white people, and how Ahmed/Shah can do so on behalf of himself and his community without becoming a tool for someone else’s diversity optics. In other words, how can Shah sell out without selling his soul?

Billed — one assumes — as a comedy, Bait is occasionally funny. There’s a running joke, for instance, in which Shah (like Ahmed himself) is mistaken for Dev Patel. But as the series progresses, it evolves into something more searching: an insightful meditation on fame, identity, and the particular psychic toll of being visible in an industry that wants your face more than your humanity. It often feels like a direct peek into Ahmed’s own head as he has navigated a career that spans roles true to his art (The Night Of, Sound of Metal, Hamlet), franchise obligations (Venom, Rogue One), and the uncomfortable territory in between.

Tonally, Bait is a little uneven — but that feels largely by design. Ahmed lures us in with something that has almost an Entourage-like energy, a comedy about an actor on the cusp of superstardom, before pulling the rug out entirely. The further in you get, the more the show reveals itself to be a genuine reckoning: with ambition, with compromise, with what it costs to make yourself legible to an audience that has never had to think about any of this. It’s a magic trick disguised as a vanity project. Which, given what the show is actually about, feels exactly right.

‘Bait’ is now streaming on Prime Video.