Rapper and actor Riz Ahmed has recently shared that he was hospitalised during the shooting of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Opening about his "intense" and "prolonged" illness, he said his body gave up on him as he was grappling with severe grief and exhaustion.
"Around the time of taking on Sound of Metal, I had had a very intense kind of health-related experience myself, where I had to grapple with the grief but also the acceptance around that," he shared, in an interview on Penn Badgley’s co-hosted Podcrushed podcast.
The issue became severe and Ahmed had to be hospitalised for a brief amount of time. "I had to really try to recreate my strength. It was like building myself up from scratch. It was super scary and intense and quite prolonged, actually," he noted.
"Something very silent and very intense had happened to me, and I wasn't getting better quickly. For a minute, I was like, 'Am I ever going to get my life back?' " he said, describing the period as a "deep kind of grief and fear and terror and yet, also a kind of tremendous liberation and gratitude and acceptance," he added.
Although the experience made him ill and weak, he said that it was a profound period of realisation where he realised the importance of everything he has and understanding that there are many things away from a person's control. "You don't control a single thing. You don't even control your body. In the most strange way, I never felt more grateful, more at peace, more content than when I felt like I was going to lose my whole life," he said.
And that was the time when he knew the script of Sound of Metal was the project he had to take. "When I read the script, I was like, 'I know what this is, you know, and I need to tell this story," he said, underlining how the film found him at the right time.
