Riz Ahmed revealed he’s lost two family members to coronavirus in a candid interview with GQ Hype.
The “Venom” actor shared: “I just want to believe their deaths and all the others aren’t for nothing. We gotta step up to reimagine a better future.”
Ahmed, who was born in London to a British Pakistani family, also got political during the chat, telling the mag of the ongoing crisis: “Trump is using it as an excuse to try to ban immigration and the Hungarian government is centralizing power off the back of this.
“I’m seeing reports of India, where the government are calling it ‘corona-jihad’ and they’re trying to blame it on the spread of Muslims and they are segregating hospitals between Muslims and non-Muslims.”
Ahmed adds of the aftermath of COVID-19: “We’re going to migrate to online living in a way that we could have done before but just didn’t. The seeds of that were already sown.
“We’re accelerating towards a world of closed borders, a fear of the outsider, governments with sweeping powers. And equally, we’re accelerating towards the fact that the economy doesn’t come first. Lives come first. The planet comes first. Our general well-being comes first.”
He then says of standing up for what he believes in: “Sometimes you wonder whether certain things are appropriate to say out loud publicly in a really brazen way or whether they are the kind of thing that you just let pass through your head when you’re in the shower or say to a few close friends.
“As an artist, I don’t want to be defined as an activist. I want to be defined as an artist. I want to step up to a blank canvas to paint something.”
Read the full article online at GQ Hype.
