In ‘City of Tiny Lights,’ Riz Ahmed Completes His Transformation

When Nightcrawler made its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2014, Riz Ahmed was a completely unknown quantity, and despite a crazy-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal’s best efforts to run away with that film, Ahmed made his mark as an eager — if naive — assistant. There was an innocence to Ahmed’s character, Rick, that put the audience on his side, out of a protective instinct. Gyllenhaal was playing such an overbearing loose-cannon of a character that Rick seemed even more vulnerable (it turns out he was), and Ahmed was the beneficiary of that.

Ahmed’s ability to get the audience instinctively on his side got played with a lot on HBO’s The Night Of, especially in the early going. That way he has of looking easily in over his head was crucial to the audience developing a bond with Naz as that series began. But the interesting thing about The Night Of was how it transformed Naz through his experience in prison. Halfway through the season, Naz was figuring out how to get along behind bars. That meant drugs; that meant tattoos; that meant shaving his head and bulking up and generally exiting prison looking far more like a criminal than he did on the way in.

It’s this version of Riz Ahmed — bulky, tatted-up, head shaved — who appears as the main character in City of Tiny Lights, which is making its premiere in Toronto this week. Ahmed plays a London private eye looking to solve a disappearance that just may end up leading him down back alleys to his past. It’s a stylish little modern noir, and it features native Londoner Ahmed playing British for a change, but most importantly, it represents the kind of transformation that could bring Ahmed into a different phase of his career. Maybe it’s just residual bulk from his The Night Of requirements, but he really pulls off the tough-guy routine in this movie, even when he’s not necessarily a bad guy. If you told me this a year ago, I’d have been awfully incredulous.

Next up, we’ll be seeing Ahmed in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an action blockbuster where he won’t be the star but he will get yet another opportunity to establish himself even further in his new rough and tumble persona. Prison did not work out well for Naz on The Night Of, but it may well have worked out quite all right for Riz Ahmed.