Asro
At the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the creative team behind Prime Video’s provocative new limited series Bait gathered to peel back the layers of a production that is as much a psychological study as it is a dark comedy. The series, which centers on a British-Pakistani actor navigating the surreal, often hostile landscape of auditioning for the role of James Bond, serves as a searing critique of identity, surveillance, and the performative nature of belonging in the West.
The panel featured the show’s star and creative force, Riz Ahmed, alongside co-showrunner Ben Carlin, producer Allie Moore, director Bassam Tariq, and music supervisor Kira Elwis. Moderated by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Daniel Kwan, the conversation offered a rare, unfiltered glimpse into how a project born from personal trauma evolved into a genre-bending narrative that challenges the boundaries of television storytelling.
The Genesis of an Identity Crisis: From Rogue One to Reality
While Bait is now synonymous with the high-stakes, hyper-masculine world of 007, Riz Ahmed revealed that the project’s origins were far more grounded in his own lived experiences. The inspiration for the series did not arrive as a singular, grand idea about cinema history, but rather as a reaction to the jarring dissonance between his public persona and his private life.
Ahmed, whose career has skyrocketed through roles in blockbuster hits like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the critically acclaimed HBO limited series The Night Of, spoke candidly about the "disconnection" he felt during the height of his fame. He described a surreal existence where the world perceived him as a high-profile celebrity living a life of glamour, while in reality, he was struggling to reconcile that image with the mundane, often humiliating, realities of being a person of color in the West.
"Somebody told me that distance is the amount of shame that you carry," Ahmed shared with the audience at the Hammer Museum. "I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s true. I need to get therapy or make a TV show about it.’"
This duality reached a breaking point when Ahmed found himself being treated as a suspected shoplifter at a Tesco grocery store in the very same week that his Star Wars posters were plastered across London. He recounted the absurdity of being viewed as a global icon one day and a suspicious outsider the next—a contradiction he described as "walking around in flip-flops and cycle shorts" while people imagined him "on a yacht with Han Solo." This internal tension—the gap between the projection and the person—became the heartbeat of Bait.
Chronology of a Concept: Finding the "Bond" Focal Point
The pivot toward the James Bond mythology was a collaborative intervention. While Ahmed provided the raw, emotional core of the story, co-showrunner Ben Carlin helped refine the narrative vehicle that would carry these heavy themes.
"We needed one focal point, one vessel or symbol with which to tell this story," Carlin explained during the panel. "It’s less about how the outside world is reacting—though that is present—and more about what that pressure is doing to the protagonist internally."
The choice of James Bond was strategic and symbolic. Bond represents the ultimate "insider"—the quintessential British hero whose silhouette is synonymous with national identity and institutional power. By forcing a British-Pakistani protagonist into the audition room for the role, the show immediately creates a friction point. It highlights the inherent absurdity of a system that demands performers assimilate into a specific, rigid archetype of "Britishness" while simultaneously marking them as perpetual outsiders.
The creative team spent months workshopping how this audition process would function as a metaphor for the broader Muslim-in-the-West experience. For Ahmed, the connection was visceral: "Being Muslim in the West feels like you’re stuck in a spy thriller." By leaning into themes of surveillance, paranoia, and the feeling of being "looked at but not really seen," the team utilized Bond imagery not as a homage to the franchise, but as a mirror for the protagonist’s psychological entrapment.
Supporting Data: Experimenting with Tone and Style
One of the most ambitious aspects of Bait is its refusal to adhere to a singular visual or narrative language. Because the protagonist is undergoing a profound identity crisis, the showrunners decided the series itself should mirror that instability.
"The show is an identity crisis," Ahmed noted. "So, why should it have a stable style?"
The result is an episodic structure that shifts wildly in tone and genre. One episode might feel like a high-octane Bollywood soap opera, complete with heightened melodrama and vibrant, rhythmic editing, while the next might lean into the quiet, intimate realism of a Richard Linklater "walk-and-talk" film.
This tonal fluidity posed a significant challenge for the production team. Director Bassam Tariq spoke at length about the difficulty of balancing these shifts without losing the audience’s emotional investment. Referring to a particularly intense, Bollywood-esque sequence, Tariq explained that the goal was never to pay empty tribute to the genre, but to use its conventions to reach a place of genuine, jarring impact.
"You want to make sure that it doesn’t just feel like a pastiche," Tariq said. "You want the audience to be so invested that when the scene hits, they don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s a Bollywood trope.’ You want them to go, ‘Fuck.’"
Producer Allie Moore echoed this sentiment, noting that the guiding principles throughout the chaotic shoot were always "character and tone." By anchoring the show’s shifting aesthetics in the protagonist’s internal struggle, the team ensured that even the most absurd moments felt tethered to a grounded, emotional reality.
Music as Narrative: The Auditory Identity
The soundtrack of Bait is as much a character as the lead actor. Music supervisor Kira Elwis was tasked with creating a sonic landscape that could bridge the gap between the protagonist’s heritage and his current reality.
Elwis described an exhaustive process of mining classic Pakistani and Bollywood soundtracks, not for their "exoticism," but for their emotional weight. These traditional sounds were then woven together with contemporary, underground tracks, creating a soundscape that felt fractured, modern, and deeply personal. The music acts as a constant reminder of the protagonist’s cultural background, constantly bumping up against the rigid, Western-centric expectations of the film industry he is trying to break into.
Implications: The Purpose of Story
As the panel drew to a close, the conversation shifted from the mechanics of production to the broader implications of the series. Ahmed shared an anecdote about an early screening in Texas, where audience members—many of whom had no background in the British-Pakistani experience—expressed a profound sense of recognition.
"To be able to recognize yourself in the stranger is the purpose of story," Ahmed concluded.
Bait is more than a critique of the entertainment industry or a satire on the search for the next 007. It is a work that interrogates the human need to be understood in a world that is often too preoccupied with categorizing people into boxes. By turning the lens on the "stranger," the team behind Bait hopes to force a broader conversation about the nature of visibility.
In a cultural moment where identity is frequently commodified and packaged for mass consumption, Bait stands as a defiant, messy, and deeply human retort. It suggests that while the system may demand a sanitized, recognizable performance, the truth of a person—with all their flaws, insecurities, and contradictions—is the only thing worth telling.
As the project continues to generate buzz, the message from the Hammer Museum panel is clear: the most effective way to challenge a narrative is to rewrite it from the inside out. For Riz Ahmed and his collaborators, Bait is not just a show—it is a reclamation of the self from the gaze of the "spy thriller" that is modern life.
Sagoh
Iffa Jayyana
