Riz Ahmed on The Night Of, Lena Dunham, and Why E.T. Made Him Cry | Screen Tests | W Magazine

In this Screen Tests interview, Riz Ahmed (The Night Of, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The OA, Girls) talks his first acting job in The Road to Guantánamo, taking selfies with immigration services as they gave him a patdown, how E.T. made him cry, his first kiss, and his traumatizing first memory. Since the premiere of the HBO crime drama The Night Of came out, Riz Ahmed has been embraced as one of the internet's new boyfriends, joining the ranks of actors like Oscar Isaac and Donald Glover. But Ahmed is not just a chameleon-like actor, who can go from dark thrillers, like Nightcrawler, to playing a surf instructor opposite Lena Dunham in Girls, but a musician who performs as part of the Swet Shop Boys, a group whose two albums have been critically acclaimed, and a socially-conscious actor who is not afraid to speak up about causes he believes in, like when he wrote an essay for The Guardian about the difficulties of being a British Pakistani actor. RIZ AHMED: The first time I left London was at the age of 2 to go to Pakistan, um, to be circumcised. We make a whole song and dance about it. That's my first memory, still traumatized. There's a bit gap where I probably tried to block out all the memories until I get to 5. W MAG: The Night Of, which is why you're here, is to some degree about this. How did that come to you? I thought it made it, to your point, a much bigger point than just about race. RIZ AHMED: The character I played in The Night Of, Nasir Khan, goes