Pushkin. I just kind of felt the tears on my face and I was like, what the hell is going on? That's what it's light. When you really communicate with sign language, you'll communicate with your whole body. That's a totally different kind of communication than, you know, the transaction of just words. That's riz Acmanon. He was nominated for an OSCAR for his performance in the movie Sound of Metal. In the film, he plays a musician who loses his hearing, and he says playing the part changed how he moves about in this world. In his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, riz plays a character based on his own life, and he says that role changed how he sees himself. I realized that up until his point as an actor, I'd become adept to molding masks and wearing them for other people and representing other people, and representing for other people a community or whatever. And I realized that actually, the next stage of growth is about not molding and wearing masks, but taking them off. In this episode, what happens when an actor takes the mask off and learns how to play himself. I'm doctor Maya Schunker, a cognitive scientist who studies how and why we change. This is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. You know. Typically a slight change of plans focuses on how people have navigated extraordinary change in their personal lives and what that's taught them about who they are in their identity and how they've shifted perspectives as a result of this big change. With your interview in particular, I'm flipping it a bit, which is, you're obviously a highly skilled actor, and I want to hear how embodying distinct roles in your career has changed you in some ways, right, your understanding of the world, the world around you, because I imagine that sometimes the best way to learn about who we are is to see undiscovered parts of ourselves reflected in the characters that we play, right, absolutely, That sounds amazing. Well, thank you. So to start off it sounded metal. Do you mind for listeners who haven't seen the film, can you just give a quick synopsis? Yeah? Sure so. Sound of Metal is the story of Rubin and Lou. There are a couple, they live on the road. They're in a band together they live together, so it's kind of them against the world in their little cocoon. And you know, all of a sudden rubin the drama and the producer of this duo loses his hearing. It's a sudden onset hearing loss. And what ends up happening is he questions his place in the world, his place in the relationship, his worth and value in the band, and inevitably it triggers some of his issues with addiction, and so his entire life is derailed. And yet in that process of relinquishing all those roles and identities that he used to define himself through, he actually kind of finds himself and connects to a part of himself that he didn't know was there, that he didn't know he needed to. It's beautiful and curious. What did you learn about the deaf community by immersing yourself in it for this role? So so much? I mean, I thought I just signed up to learn American sign language and learn how to play the drums, But what I learned was so so much more. I feel like the deaf community taught me the meaning of the word communication. I feel like the deaf community taught me what listening really is Listening isn't something you just do with your ears. It's something you do with your entire body, with your energy, by holding space for someone else with your attention. You know, it's an act of love listening, and it's something that is it's an all body activity. And similarly with communication, you know, I kind of found myself getting far more emotional talking about you know, certain topics and sign language than I would or if I if I had the mask of words to hide behind. I think of Jeremy Stone, my sign instructor, who told me that there's this trope in the deaf community that hearing people are emotionally repressed because they hide behind words, and the deaf community is so much about communication and embodied communication rather than physiological listening. That yeah, it really kind of worked me up to what those words really mean. You give an example of how that expressed itself in you. Yes, So one example is, you know, Jeremy and I would meet up every day to him to teach me sign language for a couple of hours every morning for about seven months. And over that period of time, you know, you quickly move past you know, grammar and vocabulary and your starts becoming each other's therapists and each other's kind of best buddies. And I remember it was a moment we were just both talking about our lives, really our experiences, talking actually about how they might have overlapped with the characters of Ruben, that the idea of kind of feeling like an outsider, always looking for that place that you might belong and finding that you didn't, so having to create your own place and belonging. And I think we were just talking about high school, you know, and our experiences, and it couldn't have been more different. You grew up, you know, Afro Latin in Harlem, a deaf kid in a hearing school, you know, I grew up British Pakistani working class in a push white private school in the suburbs. But there was just some overlap and we were just talking and HAS found myself welling up and I just kind of felt the tears on my face and I was like, what the hell is going on? And he kind of that's when he stopped me and said, that's that's what it's light. When you really communicate with sign language, you're communicate with your whole body. Your body's reliving the experience and you're transmitting that to me with your energy. That's a totally different kind of communication than, you know, the transaction of just words. Yeah, it's so interesting you say this. I know we're both We were both at Oxford at various points, and my thesis was about multisensory perception and the fact that it doesn't make sense to study the senses and isolation. What we see can affect what we hear, what we taste can affect what we touch, And my research was on how our high level expectations of the world infiltrate all of our sensory perception. Right, The attitudes and beliefs that we bring to the table affect everything, and so we sometimes can feel like we're passive recipients of sensory inputs, but actually the emotions that we have, the belief systems we carry, they inform that sensory perception in critical ways. Right, it's a bidirectional route. Absolutely. Well, it's fascinating. So the idea that there's no yeah, objective perception. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, we're kind of yeah, character baggage history, you know, backstory, if you will. In acting parlance, that's those are the goggles that you're viewing the world through exactly. You know, there's this poignant moment when Reuben is at the doctor's office because he's just had profound hearing loss, and he naively assumes that there has to be a solution to his plight, right, he resists any implication that the road ahead will be far more complex. I see that. So what can we do about it? How do I get it back? Well, you have to understand something here. Whether or not this is related to your exposure to noise or it's an autoimmune issue, doesn't really matter. I understand I've got a problem. I'm asking you what I could do about it. You know, I think so many of us in our lives experience this kind of denial in the face of an unwanted change. You know. It's so it's such a relatable moment, and so I was curious to know whether you've also had that kind of instinct at moments in your life where you've been you've either been at a crossroads, you've experienced unwanted change, where you're just hoping for that simple answer, that's simple fix. I think, in smaller ways, almost every day I find myself, you know, trying to look for simplistic solutions rather than the complex, embracing the complexity of acceptance, you know, and it's it's a it's a daily practice, is right, you know. Surrender and submission and an acceptance is something that is actually comes up in the film a lot Um. You know, the idea of the addict looking for a fix, as in a hit of drugs, it's also the addict looking for a fix a way of you know, um, making things feel better. You know. If that's what the hit of drugs do, that's what the hit of dopamine does. That's what um, the adrenaline does for the workaholic, you know, like myself, or that's also um, you know, papering over the cracks with some some kind of illusion of solving. Um. Yeah, it's it makes things feel better, but it's but it's not engaging with the world as it is. And yeah, I'm constantly in that place, I mean saying all the things that I struggle with, like terrible surrendering, Oh my gosh. I mean one thing I found so much resonance in Reuben's story because a quick personal aside, which is I was a concert violetist as a kid and a sudden acute injury in my hand derailed my musical career, and it was so clear to everyone Riz other than me, that my journey was over and slowly over the years. And I think this touches on some of the themes in Sound of Metal and in Mogil Mogley you have to figure out who you are outside of that one pursuit. It calls into question this very natural question we all ask ourselves, which is who are we right? You know, in cognitive science there's this term called identity foreclosure, and it does refer to the idea that we can feel very fixed in our sense of selves, especially early in adolescence, and that identity prevents us from exploring other alternatives, other avenues, other identities that we can embody. And so, you know, I think if you had asked me as a young kid, what do you love about the violin? I would have said, well, I love how it feels, I love how it sounds. Actually what I love of Riz And maybe you can relate to this as an actor, as I could get onto a stage in front of thousands of strangers and within moments I could make them feel something that they had never felt before. And that was so intoxicating and so powerful that when I realized, well, this is a trait of music that made me happy, I might have lost the violin, but let me try to find that trait elsewhere in other pursuits, right, And so ultimately it is human connection that motivated me. And so it led me to study cognitive science, right like it led me to study the human mind, and it's led me to do this podcast. That's a long winded way of saying that it's really helped me understand what losing the violin at such a formative period of my life taught me, as that I had to see my identity as more malleable. And it seems like Ruben did too. I love what you just said. I can massively relate to that. I think that you know, yeah, Sound of Metal and Ruben's journey as a character does really interrogate this idea of identity. At the start of the movie, he's this, you know, a drummer, a producer, a boyfriend who lives this itinerant life on the road in a touring band, and at the end of the movie he's the opposite of pretty much all those things. What's interesting is at the start of the movie, you see him in almost a state of undress. You know, he's shirtless, but in a way he's he's wearing a mask. You know, he's hidden behind the fortress of his drums, the cannon. You know that he's kind of firing out of the world to keep keep the world at bay from getting close to him. And he's hiding behind the mask of his blonde hair and the mask of his tattoos. And by the end of it, he's like all you know, wrapped up in Paris and like a coat and everything, but in a way he's more naked than ever. He's taken the mask off. And it's something I think about a lot, because you know, the malluability of identity is you know, sometimes becomes very apparent in these moments of crises. And I can very much relate to the experience you're talking about, and it's partly what drew me towards both Sound and Metal and Mogul Mowgli is going through a much smaller, but you know, similar experience to what those characters go through. Where I kind of found myself kind of almost you know, in a kind of state of physical you know, breakdown, just total exhaustion. My body just was just would not, you know, allow me to function at the pace I was anymore. My workaholism had kind of run its course and landed me at this crossroads where I wondered whether I could continue doing what I'm doing, not just physically but also emotionally. And what I learned in that experience, which is, yeah, the malleability of our identity, you know. And at some point you realize the work won't love you back. And at some point you realize, even if the work is a tool to get people to love you, that's never going to be enough. It's about, you know, self love, and what does that mean? Accepting yourself? You know, the person you know better than anyone, all the dirt, under the rug, the warts and all, you know, the stuff that you don't anyone. You know that you've got to love that person, need to accept that person. So hard for so many of us, and particularly when you realize as performers, many of us, rather than look inwards, we're looking out to the audience. We're looking for that round of applause, you know, we're looking to have roses thrown at our feet as we bow because we've got that deficit of self love internally, and so I don't know that was having performance taken away from me. Having the possibility of that external you know, fountain of validation taken away from me forced me to look at that internal deficit, forced me to try and start exploring the story of self love. Look, I love what you say about this cloak we wear because I also another moment that really resonated with me and sounded metal is Rubin becomes absolutely fixated on getting cochlear implants as the plot develops, right, thinking that's going to be the thing that solves my problems, that's going to be the thing that solves my angst and my anxiety. But it doesn't at all provide the relief that he had hoped for. But again, in these uncertain times, we just cling to the few things we feel are in our control, right, and we try to tie our future happiness to just those things. But you know, of course the story is so much more complicated. Yeah, what do you feel you found in that process of letting go of control, in that experience with the violin or in other life experiences, like what's the kind of shift, the kind of attitudinal shift or that's taken place for you, because I mean, you know, I can share my own experience as well, but I'm interested to hear from you what has come up when you try to go down that road of acceptance. Yeah, it's and I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this. I think one lesson is a sobering one, which is, as humans, I think we can feel entitled to exactly what I was going to say, Yeah, gratitude rightsolutely, so you start off, especially when you're younger, though, I mean, honestly, this has followed me throughout life. You feel, look if I put in, if my inputs are there, right, if I try really hard, if I work really hard, if I crush every day, like certainly it's an input output model, this life thing. And then shit hits the fan over and over again at various points in your life, and you realize control is truly an illusion, and that bad things befall great people all the time, and there's no in my mind sally, you know, I don't believe things happen for a reason. I just believe life is actually the randomness we see around us. And that's both a sad realization to have, but it also is in my mind a more accurate one to operate under, and to me that brings me some solace. Like when a bad thing happens, I don't feel it was willed by anyone or anything. I just think it is in that in the realm of randomness that happens in our lives, that's so interesting. So it's it's kind of like it's basically I'm not taking it personally. It sounds like you're saying that for you, there's enough peace in in depersonalizing the universe that you don't then need to take an extra step, because I guess there's two ways, Like I guess step one is like bad things happen sometimes I'm taking them personally, and good things happen sometimes I'm taking them personally. I'm special in the best and worst way. And then you can go one of two ways. I guess the other one one of them is what you're saying, which is actually it's not personal and you're not special. It just is, which I love. But I guess there's also another route, which has been interesting, which is good things and bad things happen for some kind of reason or that there or that there's some kind of lesson in there. Even if there isn't a lesson, even if they haven't happened for a reason, we can metabolize them into something that we can come out the other side stronger. We can. So there is some kind of spiritual board game that we're all playing that you can find a gift inside every challenge. And I kind of lead in that direction, not saying that your approach you might not. I'm mutually exclusive, but I think they're compatible. Is I think the only change in word I would use is rather than seeing it as a as a spiritual journey or spiritual outcome, I just see it as a cognitive one, which is I think as humans we are natural born storytellers, and we will try and construct narratives out of the randomness that happens to us, if only to justify why things have happened to us. Right, It's effortless for us to search for silver linings, for example, after a tragedy, because it just feels like we must make sense of randomness. And so I find that even though again I don't think the universe had a reason behind it, that like this thing was meant to happen, I'm the same as you. I absolutely am looking for a lesson to be learned, a way to be stronger, something that I might pull from the experience that I might not have been able to pull from another experience. I entered the same psychology as you. I think we're just calling it slightly different things. I love it, and I actually think that putting trauma, putting good luck, putting life like, shaping it into story is it's profoundly healing. I think it actually strengthens us. It strengthens our connections to each other and to ourselves. It's not just a kind of opium, yeah, that we kind of, you know, indulge ourselves with. I think it's it's a core part of the equipment we've been given on this planet. To like it, be at our best, connect with others and connect to ourselves. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. Riz Ahmed's most recent film is called Mogul Mowgli, which he co wrote with director Bassam Tarik. It's the story of a British Pakistani rapper named Zed who's just reaching the height of his career when he's diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and winds up in the hospital. It's a story about family, about where we come from and the meaning of home. Themes that Riz says are pulled from his real life. So it's a deeply kind of personal film. Bassama and I realized, you know, as we became friends who were thinking about what we'd like to make together, is the one role I never get to play as someone like myself, The one story he never gets to tell is his story. I realized that up until his point as an actor, I've been kind of I'd become adept to molding masks and wearing them for the people and representing other people, and representing for other people a community would And I realized that actually the next stage of growth is about not molding and wearing masks, but taking them off. Not representing for others or representing others, just presenting yourself. And I've always been driven by this idea, this mission of trying to stretch culture, and I realize, actually can tauting yourself to fit into other people's ready made molds maybe doesn't stretch culture as much as contributing a new mold, you know, bringing all of yourself to the table. So often, you know, particularly those of us have identities. We always taught to leave part of ourselves at the door, you know, And that's an amazing skill. You can build an acting career off of it, you know, from a young age, I'm kind of wearing shield of argems and speaking dut home. Then I'm you know, dressed in a suit and tie named after kind of India's colonial British rulers private school, and then I'm skipping class to hang out with my boys, you know, on the corner. And that's a totally different hybrid culture as well. So I'm changing accents, changing costumes, playing these different characters. Being unable to bring all of myself to any of these environments means I'm acting. And you know that's great. That's a skill, but it can rob you of a core, and it can allow you to internalize this idea that there's something wrong with you. It can really feed this lack of self love that again, in turn drives your need for validation and performance and wearing masks for other people's approval and to fit in. And so this film was very much about both me and Z trying to accept ourselves without a role or a mask to hide behind. Yeah, I mean, it can be so scary to look in the mirror so critically and so deeply, sometimes just for fear of what we might find. Did you face that? I mean, we're how did you overcome any anxieties associated with writing something and acting something that was so deeply personal? You know, honestly, this was very scary film to make, and I was kind of secretly hoping that no one would see it. So the fact that people are seeing and liking it is both lovely but terrifying. But also I'd say the fear of what I might find, or the fear of being judged, was outweighed by desperate need. I had to try and make sense of some of this, to try and metabolize my own experience. The catharsis that that I knew might be possible. If I was able to shape all these disparate strands of my identity and all these weird contradictions of my experience into story, then it could cohere as a story. Then it would help it to cohere for me internally, you know, in my life. Was there something specific that writing Z taught you about yourself? It was interesting because with sound a metal, you know, the script was written it was a master piece by Darius Smyder. So I can look at it and step back from it, and as you said, start at this starting point of sitting outside of it, thinking, oh, what is Ruben learning? What is this journey? What is his arc? And you know, it's interesting because when I was taking on the character of Ruben, I thought, Okay, well, this guy's nothing like me, you know, And then you start playing any character and this is a journey you always go on with every character, and hopefully the journey the audience goes on with that character as well. You start off going all right, who's this Guy's nothing like me? And by the end of it, you're like, I'm exactly this person. And that's because you know, I mean, my belief is that the differences that seemingly separate us are an illusion. Deep down, we are we all share the same emotional core. We have different experiences, belief thoughts, but we all feel the same things. And that's kind of where we are in that super feeling that we all ship. But I was like, I'm not an addict. Whatever this is going to be research, I'll go to my first kind of addiction recovery meeting and I'm like, just I feel like, did someone read my diary? Like what this is all about me? I mean, I, you know, I haven't if it's from substance abuse in that way, but it's like I don't know, just that the patterns, the behaviors, the attitude, the entitlement, that the tragedy of uniqueness, you know, all of this kind of stuff with Mogul Mowgli. In a way, even though the character, you know, it's starting point, the seed of that character is me. It takes flight in its own way, and Z becomes his own person. Even though it's it's you know, I recognize it as a starting point. I don't have that separation. I'm not able to step back and look at it and all right, what's the arc? What's the lesson? You know, Bizarma and I were making this film. You know, it's even hard for us now to depress about it, and all the way through making it. If you asked us, really, what's the film about? Really what does Z learn? We'd find it hard to articulate it. We're so close to it that it's hard to kind of articulate. But perhaps that's why in a way, it's kind of give me one of my profound lessons because it's it's it hasn't been an intellectual one, It's been an emotional one. And I think it is something to do with self acceptance. I think, you know, Zed learning to love himself or accept himself, if not love himself outside of a you know, a crowd of screaming fans telling him he has worth, or outside of his dad telling him that he you know, isn't ashamed of him, or you know, any of that stuff. I think allowed me to also kind of go on this journey and like, well, is are we enough? Am I enough? Is Risen enough? Riz when he's not playing a character Rism when he's not being interviewed Riz, when he's not you know, dressed up in nice clothes and stood in a red carpet, It's like, are we enough? And I think what Bissam and I I think hoped to challenge ourselves to to to believe in making this film, is that we are enough, you know, particularly as minorities or outside as you internalize the idea that you're not, but we are, We're enough. And I feel like, yeah, in a way, it brings it back to that mantra and addiction recovery. I am enough, I have enough, I do enough, and I feel like something in going on this journey with the character Z allowed me to start believing that, you know, we are enough. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Z, the main character receives an autoimmune diagnosis, which ends his rapping career. No. I don't want to alarm you, misterron War, but from the scams we've done, your muscles seem to be weakening. So what is that, like, say, think stroke. It could be a number of things. We need to run some more tests to determine what course of action is best. Okay, so I can stop buying a couple of weeks, get those done. I got to all that starts in less than a week. Let's just try a couple of things, shall we. And you've spoken about how this is a metaphor for his own struggle navigating his warring identities, right, this idea that you know, your body can't even recognize itself, so it's attacking itself. And can you just say a little bit more about this and how it might have in some way reflected your own experience straddling two cultures. Yeah, what's interesting because people who live in diaspora who live in places are different to where their ancestors have lived for many generations have a much higher incidence of autoimmune conditions than the general population. And Psalma and I when we were thinking about how do we dramatize tangibly, you know, Z's lack of self love or his identity crisis, or the way he keeps pushing away the embrace of his culture, his inheritance and where he's from. How can he wrestle him to the floor. We came up this idea, this autoimmunity and this inherited condition, and as we started researching it, there's kind of you know three I'd say, you know, there were three kind of theories that we found interesting, of varying degrees of you know, signed if research or data to back them up, but you know, artistically we found and fascinating. One is I think called minority stress theory. Was this idea that if you're an ethnic minority, you're implicitly and explicitly told you're not welcome, so you feel threatened. Your immune system is in a state of hyper vigilance, so it's an overdrive. It can't switch off. There's another theory which is that just that you know about climate and diet. And this third theory I came across this idea that you know, it's it's an identity crisis played out on a molecular level. The body doesn't recognize itself, so it's rejecting itself. It's almost a lack of self love. It's internalizing this sense of being an outsider until it manifests a kind of self hate. And so we thought that that was a very apt metaphor, but also something that you know, I don't know true to experience of a lot of people who've you know, or outsiders racially or otherwise. Yeah, I so resonate with that. You've taken on these really ambitious, heavy roles and I can't imagine it's all peaches and cream where you you know, you're like immediately enlightened and you see all these insights, right, I imagine it's a it's a dirty, challenging, potentially well being harming exercise along the way, And for many people who are navigating a change, they have to do that hard work right along the way, and it's so uncomfortable. It's so challenging to put in that effort to either figure oneself out or to navigate a hard change. And I'm just wondering what advice you'd have for listeners who are, you know, not acting these roles, but are in a similar kind of challenging circumstance. I keep thinking of this real poem, this idea, this is line in it? Does it go to the limits of your longing? It's a beautiful poem, and in it there is this line and it just says, just keep going. No feeling is final, and I just love it. I just think, yeah, I think, so we can do, right, we keep going till we can't. But when we can't go any further, just know that there'll be people who that that keep going. You know, Dodd and their journey on was only been made possible by you know, the footsteps you put down. So I don't know, I just feel like I don't know. I don't have any answers. I don't know if we ever get to any but we just keep going, you know, we just keep going. I'm assuming you've you've made this movie. It's out that it's probably just the first chapter. Is that how you see it? So what you're saying is seem cool. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I've just commissioned. I have no budget, but you know your license. Let's do it. Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week when I talk to Annie Duke, an internationally renowned poker champion who's won more than four million dollars. Annie's also an expert on the science of quitting, something she thinks we should do a lot more of. You know, one of the reasons I think I'm so fascinated with quitting is because I was a poker player, and what distinguishes great poker players from everybody else is that is mainly quitting. They quit a lot more so, they're just very good at cutting their losses. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The best part of creating this show is getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Holiday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, as well as Razza Hellem for his insights on this interview, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker and please remember to subscribe, share and rate the show to help get the word out. See you next week.

Pushkin. I just kind of felt the tears on my face and I was like, what the hell is going on? That's what it's light. When you really communicate with sign language, you'll communicate with your whole body. That's a totally different kind of communication than, you know, the transaction of just words. That's riz Acmanon. He was nominated for an OSCAR for his performance in the movie Sound of Metal. In the film, he plays a musician who loses his hearing, and he says playing the part changed how he moves about in this world. In his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, riz plays a character based on his own life, and he says that role changed how he sees himself. I realized that up until his point as an actor, I'd become adept to molding masks and wearing them for other people and representing other people, and representing for other people a community or whatever. And I realized that actually, the next stage of growth is about not molding and wearing masks, but taking them off. In this episode, what happens when an actor takes the mask off and learns how to play himself. I'm doctor Maya Schunker, a cognitive scientist who studies how and why we change. This is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. You know. Typically a slight change of plans focuses on how people have navigated extraordinary change in their personal lives and what that's taught them about who they are in their identity and how they've shifted perspectives as a result of this big change. With your interview in particular, I'm flipping it a bit, which is, you're obviously a highly skilled actor, and I want to hear how embodying distinct roles in your career has changed you in some ways, right, your understanding of the world, the world around you, because I imagine that sometimes the best way to learn about who we are is to see undiscovered parts of ourselves reflected in the characters that we play, right, absolutely, That sounds amazing. Well, thank you. So to start off it sounded metal. Do you mind for listeners who haven't seen the film, can you just give a quick synopsis? Yeah? Sure so. Sound of Metal is the story of Rubin and Lou. There are a couple, they live on the road. They're in a band together they live together, so it's kind of them against the world in their little cocoon. And you know, all of a sudden rubin the drama and the producer of this duo loses his hearing. It's a sudden onset hearing loss. And what ends up happening is he questions his place in the world, his place in the relationship, his worth and value in the band, and inevitably it triggers some of his issues with addiction, and so his entire life is derailed. And yet in that process of relinquishing all those roles and identities that he used to define himself through, he actually kind of finds himself and connects to a part of himself that he didn't know was there, that he didn't know he needed to. It's beautiful and curious. What did you learn about the deaf community by immersing yourself in it for this role? So so much? I mean, I thought I just signed up to learn American sign language and learn how to play the drums, But what I learned was so so much more. I feel like the deaf community taught me the meaning of the word communication. I feel like the deaf community taught me what listening really is Listening isn't something you just do with your ears. It's something you do with your entire body, with your energy, by holding space for someone else with your attention. You know, it's an act of love listening, and it's something that is it's an all body activity. And similarly with communication, you know, I kind of found myself getting far more emotional talking about you know, certain topics and sign language than I would or if I if I had the mask of words to hide behind. I think of Jeremy Stone, my sign instructor, who told me that there's this trope in the deaf community that hearing people are emotionally repressed because they hide behind words, and the deaf community is so much about communication and embodied communication rather than physiological listening. That yeah, it really kind of worked me up to what those words really mean. You give an example of how that expressed itself in you. Yes, So one example is, you know, Jeremy and I would meet up every day to him to teach me sign language for a couple of hours every morning for about seven months. And over that period of time, you know, you quickly move past you know, grammar and vocabulary and your starts becoming each other's therapists and each other's kind of best buddies. And I remember it was a moment we were just both talking about our lives, really our experiences, talking actually about how they might have overlapped with the characters of Ruben, that the idea of kind of feeling like an outsider, always looking for that place that you might belong and finding that you didn't, so having to create your own place and belonging. And I think we were just talking about high school, you know, and our experiences, and it couldn't have been more different. You grew up, you know, Afro Latin in Harlem, a deaf kid in a hearing school, you know, I grew up British Pakistani working class in a push white private school in the suburbs. But there was just some overlap and we were just talking and HAS found myself welling up and I just kind of felt the tears on my face and I was like, what the hell is going on? And he kind of that's when he stopped me and said, that's that's what it's light. When you really communicate with sign language, you're communicate with your whole body. Your body's reliving the experience and you're transmitting that to me with your energy. That's a totally different kind of communication than, you know, the transaction of just words. Yeah, it's so interesting you say this. I know we're both We were both at Oxford at various points, and my thesis was about multisensory perception and the fact that it doesn't make sense to study the senses and isolation. What we see can affect what we hear, what we taste can affect what we touch, And my research was on how our high level expectations of the world infiltrate all of our sensory perception. Right, The attitudes and beliefs that we bring to the table affect everything, and so we sometimes can feel like we're passive recipients of sensory inputs, but actually the emotions that we have, the belief systems we carry, they inform that sensory perception in critical ways. Right, it's a bidirectional route. Absolutely. Well, it's fascinating. So the idea that there's no yeah, objective perception. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, we're kind of yeah, character baggage history, you know, backstory, if you will. In acting parlance, that's those are the goggles that you're viewing the world through exactly. You know, there's this poignant moment when Reuben is at the doctor's office because he's just had profound hearing loss, and he naively assumes that there has to be a solution to his plight, right, he resists any implication that the road ahead will be far more complex. I see that. So what can we do about it? How do I get it back? Well, you have to understand something here. Whether or not this is related to your exposure to noise or it's an autoimmune issue, doesn't really matter. I understand I've got a problem. I'm asking you what I could do about it. You know, I think so many of us in our lives experience this kind of denial in the face of an unwanted change. You know. It's so it's such a relatable moment, and so I was curious to know whether you've also had that kind of instinct at moments in your life where you've been you've either been at a crossroads, you've experienced unwanted change, where you're just hoping for that simple answer, that's simple fix. I think, in smaller ways, almost every day I find myself, you know, trying to look for simplistic solutions rather than the complex, embracing the complexity of acceptance, you know, and it's it's a it's a daily practice, is right, you know. Surrender and submission and an acceptance is something that is actually comes up in the film a lot Um. You know, the idea of the addict looking for a fix, as in a hit of drugs, it's also the addict looking for a fix a way of you know, um, making things feel better. You know. If that's what the hit of drugs do, that's what the hit of dopamine does. That's what um, the adrenaline does for the workaholic, you know, like myself, or that's also um, you know, papering over the cracks with some some kind of illusion of solving. Um. Yeah, it's it makes things feel better, but it's but it's not engaging with the world as it is. And yeah, I'm constantly in that place, I mean saying all the things that I struggle with, like terrible surrendering, Oh my gosh. I mean one thing I found so much resonance in Reuben's story because a quick personal aside, which is I was a concert violetist as a kid and a sudden acute injury in my hand derailed my musical career, and it was so clear to everyone Riz other than me, that my journey was over and slowly over the years. And I think this touches on some of the themes in Sound of Metal and in Mogil Mogley you have to figure out who you are outside of that one pursuit. It calls into question this very natural question we all ask ourselves, which is who are we right? You know, in cognitive science there's this term called identity foreclosure, and it does refer to the idea that we can feel very fixed in our sense of selves, especially early in adolescence, and that identity prevents us from exploring other alternatives, other avenues, other identities that we can embody. And so, you know, I think if you had asked me as a young kid, what do you love about the violin? I would have said, well, I love how it feels, I love how it sounds. Actually what I love of Riz And maybe you can relate to this as an actor, as I could get onto a stage in front of thousands of strangers and within moments I could make them feel something that they had never felt before. And that was so intoxicating and so powerful that when I realized, well, this is a trait of music that made me happy, I might have lost the violin, but let me try to find that trait elsewhere in other pursuits, right, And so ultimately it is human connection that motivated me. And so it led me to study cognitive science, right like it led me to study the human mind, and it's led me to do this podcast. That's a long winded way of saying that it's really helped me understand what losing the violin at such a formative period of my life taught me, as that I had to see my identity as more malleable. And it seems like Ruben did too. I love what you just said. I can massively relate to that. I think that you know, yeah, Sound of Metal and Ruben's journey as a character does really interrogate this idea of identity. At the start of the movie, he's this, you know, a drummer, a producer, a boyfriend who lives this itinerant life on the road in a touring band, and at the end of the movie he's the opposite of pretty much all those things. What's interesting is at the start of the movie, you see him in almost a state of undress. You know, he's shirtless, but in a way he's he's wearing a mask. You know, he's hidden behind the fortress of his drums, the cannon. You know that he's kind of firing out of the world to keep keep the world at bay from getting close to him. And he's hiding behind the mask of his blonde hair and the mask of his tattoos. And by the end of it, he's like all you know, wrapped up in Paris and like a coat and everything, but in a way he's more naked than ever. He's taken the mask off. And it's something I think about a lot, because you know, the malluability of identity is you know, sometimes becomes very apparent in these moments of crises. And I can very much relate to the experience you're talking about, and it's partly what drew me towards both Sound and Metal and Mogul Mowgli is going through a much smaller, but you know, similar experience to what those characters go through. Where I kind of found myself kind of almost you know, in a kind of state of physical you know, breakdown, just total exhaustion. My body just was just would not, you know, allow me to function at the pace I was anymore. My workaholism had kind of run its course and landed me at this crossroads where I wondered whether I could continue doing what I'm doing, not just physically but also emotionally. And what I learned in that experience, which is, yeah, the malleability of our identity, you know. And at some point you realize the work won't love you back. And at some point you realize, even if the work is a tool to get people to love you, that's never going to be enough. It's about, you know, self love, and what does that mean? Accepting yourself? You know, the person you know better than anyone, all the dirt, under the rug, the warts and all, you know, the stuff that you don't anyone. You know that you've got to love that person, need to accept that person. So hard for so many of us, and particularly when you realize as performers, many of us, rather than look inwards, we're looking out to the audience. We're looking for that round of applause, you know, we're looking to have roses thrown at our feet as we bow because we've got that deficit of self love internally, and so I don't know that was having performance taken away from me. Having the possibility of that external you know, fountain of validation taken away from me forced me to look at that internal deficit, forced me to try and start exploring the story of self love. Look, I love what you say about this cloak we wear because I also another moment that really resonated with me and sounded metal is Rubin becomes absolutely fixated on getting cochlear implants as the plot develops, right, thinking that's going to be the thing that solves my problems, that's going to be the thing that solves my angst and my anxiety. But it doesn't at all provide the relief that he had hoped for. But again, in these uncertain times, we just cling to the few things we feel are in our control, right, and we try to tie our future happiness to just those things. But you know, of course the story is so much more complicated. Yeah, what do you feel you found in that process of letting go of control, in that experience with the violin or in other life experiences, like what's the kind of shift, the kind of attitudinal shift or that's taken place for you, because I mean, you know, I can share my own experience as well, but I'm interested to hear from you what has come up when you try to go down that road of acceptance. Yeah, it's and I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this. I think one lesson is a sobering one, which is, as humans, I think we can feel entitled to exactly what I was going to say, Yeah, gratitude rightsolutely, so you start off, especially when you're younger, though, I mean, honestly, this has followed me throughout life. You feel, look if I put in, if my inputs are there, right, if I try really hard, if I work really hard, if I crush every day, like certainly it's an input output model, this life thing. And then shit hits the fan over and over again at various points in your life, and you realize control is truly an illusion, and that bad things befall great people all the time, and there's no in my mind sally, you know, I don't believe things happen for a reason. I just believe life is actually the randomness we see around us. And that's both a sad realization to have, but it also is in my mind a more accurate one to operate under, and to me that brings me some solace. Like when a bad thing happens, I don't feel it was willed by anyone or anything. I just think it is in that in the realm of randomness that happens in our lives, that's so interesting. So it's it's kind of like it's basically I'm not taking it personally. It sounds like you're saying that for you, there's enough peace in in depersonalizing the universe that you don't then need to take an extra step, because I guess there's two ways, Like I guess step one is like bad things happen sometimes I'm taking them personally, and good things happen sometimes I'm taking them personally. I'm special in the best and worst way. And then you can go one of two ways. I guess the other one one of them is what you're saying, which is actually it's not personal and you're not special. It just is, which I love. But I guess there's also another route, which has been interesting, which is good things and bad things happen for some kind of reason or that there or that there's some kind of lesson in there. Even if there isn't a lesson, even if they haven't happened for a reason, we can metabolize them into something that we can come out the other side stronger. We can. So there is some kind of spiritual board game that we're all playing that you can find a gift inside every challenge. And I kind of lead in that direction, not saying that your approach you might not. I'm mutually exclusive, but I think they're compatible. Is I think the only change in word I would use is rather than seeing it as a as a spiritual journey or spiritual outcome, I just see it as a cognitive one, which is I think as humans we are natural born storytellers, and we will try and construct narratives out of the randomness that happens to us, if only to justify why things have happened to us. Right, It's effortless for us to search for silver linings, for example, after a tragedy, because it just feels like we must make sense of randomness. And so I find that even though again I don't think the universe had a reason behind it, that like this thing was meant to happen, I'm the same as you. I absolutely am looking for a lesson to be learned, a way to be stronger, something that I might pull from the experience that I might not have been able to pull from another experience. I entered the same psychology as you. I think we're just calling it slightly different things. I love it, and I actually think that putting trauma, putting good luck, putting life like, shaping it into story is it's profoundly healing. I think it actually strengthens us. It strengthens our connections to each other and to ourselves. It's not just a kind of opium, yeah, that we kind of, you know, indulge ourselves with. I think it's it's a core part of the equipment we've been given on this planet. To like it, be at our best, connect with others and connect to ourselves. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. Riz Ahmed's most recent film is called Mogul Mowgli, which he co wrote with director Bassam Tarik. It's the story of a British Pakistani rapper named Zed who's just reaching the height of his career when he's diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and winds up in the hospital. It's a story about family, about where we come from and the meaning of home. Themes that Riz says are pulled from his real life. So it's a deeply kind of personal film. Bassama and I realized, you know, as we became friends who were thinking about what we'd like to make together, is the one role I never get to play as someone like myself, The one story he never gets to tell is his story. I realized that up until his point as an actor, I've been kind of I'd become adept to molding masks and wearing them for the people and representing other people, and representing for other people a community would And I realized that actually the next stage of growth is about not molding and wearing masks, but taking them off. Not representing for others or representing others, just presenting yourself. And I've always been driven by this idea, this mission of trying to stretch culture, and I realize, actually can tauting yourself to fit into other people's ready made molds maybe doesn't stretch culture as much as contributing a new mold, you know, bringing all of yourself to the table. So often, you know, particularly those of us have identities. We always taught to leave part of ourselves at the door, you know, And that's an amazing skill. You can build an acting career off of it, you know, from a young age, I'm kind of wearing shield of argems and speaking dut home. Then I'm you know, dressed in a suit and tie named after kind of India's colonial British rulers private school, and then I'm skipping class to hang out with my boys, you know, on the corner. And that's a totally different hybrid culture as well. So I'm changing accents, changing costumes, playing these different characters. Being unable to bring all of myself to any of these environments means I'm acting. And you know that's great. That's a skill, but it can rob you of a core, and it can allow you to internalize this idea that there's something wrong with you. It can really feed this lack of self love that again, in turn drives your need for validation and performance and wearing masks for other people's approval and to fit in. And so this film was very much about both me and Z trying to accept ourselves without a role or a mask to hide behind. Yeah, I mean, it can be so scary to look in the mirror so critically and so deeply, sometimes just for fear of what we might find. Did you face that? I mean, we're how did you overcome any anxieties associated with writing something and acting something that was so deeply personal? You know, honestly, this was very scary film to make, and I was kind of secretly hoping that no one would see it. So the fact that people are seeing and liking it is both lovely but terrifying. But also I'd say the fear of what I might find, or the fear of being judged, was outweighed by desperate need. I had to try and make sense of some of this, to try and metabolize my own experience. The catharsis that that I knew might be possible. If I was able to shape all these disparate strands of my identity and all these weird contradictions of my experience into story, then it could cohere as a story. Then it would help it to cohere for me internally, you know, in my life. Was there something specific that writing Z taught you about yourself? It was interesting because with sound a metal, you know, the script was written it was a master piece by Darius Smyder. So I can look at it and step back from it, and as you said, start at this starting point of sitting outside of it, thinking, oh, what is Ruben learning? What is this journey? What is his arc? And you know, it's interesting because when I was taking on the character of Ruben, I thought, Okay, well, this guy's nothing like me, you know, And then you start playing any character and this is a journey you always go on with every character, and hopefully the journey the audience goes on with that character as well. You start off going all right, who's this Guy's nothing like me? And by the end of it, you're like, I'm exactly this person. And that's because you know, I mean, my belief is that the differences that seemingly separate us are an illusion. Deep down, we are we all share the same emotional core. We have different experiences, belief thoughts, but we all feel the same things. And that's kind of where we are in that super feeling that we all ship. But I was like, I'm not an addict. Whatever this is going to be research, I'll go to my first kind of addiction recovery meeting and I'm like, just I feel like, did someone read my diary? Like what this is all about me? I mean, I, you know, I haven't if it's from substance abuse in that way, but it's like I don't know, just that the patterns, the behaviors, the attitude, the entitlement, that the tragedy of uniqueness, you know, all of this kind of stuff with Mogul Mowgli. In a way, even though the character, you know, it's starting point, the seed of that character is me. It takes flight in its own way, and Z becomes his own person. Even though it's it's you know, I recognize it as a starting point. I don't have that separation. I'm not able to step back and look at it and all right, what's the arc? What's the lesson? You know, Bizarma and I were making this film. You know, it's even hard for us now to depress about it, and all the way through making it. If you asked us, really, what's the film about? Really what does Z learn? We'd find it hard to articulate it. We're so close to it that it's hard to kind of articulate. But perhaps that's why in a way, it's kind of give me one of my profound lessons because it's it's it hasn't been an intellectual one, It's been an emotional one. And I think it is something to do with self acceptance. I think, you know, Zed learning to love himself or accept himself, if not love himself outside of a you know, a crowd of screaming fans telling him he has worth, or outside of his dad telling him that he you know, isn't ashamed of him, or you know, any of that stuff. I think allowed me to also kind of go on this journey and like, well, is are we enough? Am I enough? Is Risen enough? Riz when he's not playing a character Rism when he's not being interviewed Riz, when he's not you know, dressed up in nice clothes and stood in a red carpet, It's like, are we enough? And I think what Bissam and I I think hoped to challenge ourselves to to to believe in making this film, is that we are enough, you know, particularly as minorities or outside as you internalize the idea that you're not, but we are, We're enough. And I feel like, yeah, in a way, it brings it back to that mantra and addiction recovery. I am enough, I have enough, I do enough, and I feel like something in going on this journey with the character Z allowed me to start believing that, you know, we are enough. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Z, the main character receives an autoimmune diagnosis, which ends his rapping career. No. I don't want to alarm you, misterron War, but from the scams we've done, your muscles seem to be weakening. So what is that, like, say, think stroke. It could be a number of things. We need to run some more tests to determine what course of action is best. Okay, so I can stop buying a couple of weeks, get those done. I got to all that starts in less than a week. Let's just try a couple of things, shall we. And you've spoken about how this is a metaphor for his own struggle navigating his warring identities, right, this idea that you know, your body can't even recognize itself, so it's attacking itself. And can you just say a little bit more about this and how it might have in some way reflected your own experience straddling two cultures. Yeah, what's interesting because people who live in diaspora who live in places are different to where their ancestors have lived for many generations have a much higher incidence of autoimmune conditions than the general population. And Psalma and I when we were thinking about how do we dramatize tangibly, you know, Z's lack of self love or his identity crisis, or the way he keeps pushing away the embrace of his culture, his inheritance and where he's from. How can he wrestle him to the floor. We came up this idea, this autoimmunity and this inherited condition, and as we started researching it, there's kind of you know three I'd say, you know, there were three kind of theories that we found interesting, of varying degrees of you know, signed if research or data to back them up, but you know, artistically we found and fascinating. One is I think called minority stress theory. Was this idea that if you're an ethnic minority, you're implicitly and explicitly told you're not welcome, so you feel threatened. Your immune system is in a state of hyper vigilance, so it's an overdrive. It can't switch off. There's another theory which is that just that you know about climate and diet. And this third theory I came across this idea that you know, it's it's an identity crisis played out on a molecular level. The body doesn't recognize itself, so it's rejecting itself. It's almost a lack of self love. It's internalizing this sense of being an outsider until it manifests a kind of self hate. And so we thought that that was a very apt metaphor, but also something that you know, I don't know true to experience of a lot of people who've you know, or outsiders racially or otherwise. Yeah, I so resonate with that. You've taken on these really ambitious, heavy roles and I can't imagine it's all peaches and cream where you you know, you're like immediately enlightened and you see all these insights, right, I imagine it's a it's a dirty, challenging, potentially well being harming exercise along the way, And for many people who are navigating a change, they have to do that hard work right along the way, and it's so uncomfortable. It's so challenging to put in that effort to either figure oneself out or to navigate a hard change. And I'm just wondering what advice you'd have for listeners who are, you know, not acting these roles, but are in a similar kind of challenging circumstance. I keep thinking of this real poem, this idea, this is line in it? Does it go to the limits of your longing? It's a beautiful poem, and in it there is this line and it just says, just keep going. No feeling is final, and I just love it. I just think, yeah, I think, so we can do, right, we keep going till we can't. But when we can't go any further, just know that there'll be people who that that keep going. You know, Dodd and their journey on was only been made possible by you know, the footsteps you put down. So I don't know, I just feel like I don't know. I don't have any answers. I don't know if we ever get to any but we just keep going, you know, we just keep going. I'm assuming you've you've made this movie. It's out that it's probably just the first chapter. Is that how you see it? So what you're saying is seem cool. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I've just commissioned. I have no budget, but you know your license. Let's do it. Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week when I talk to Annie Duke, an internationally renowned poker champion who's won more than four million dollars. Annie's also an expert on the science of quitting, something she thinks we should do a lot more of. You know, one of the reasons I think I'm so fascinated with quitting is because I was a poker player, and what distinguishes great poker players from everybody else is that is mainly quitting. They quit a lot more so, they're just very good at cutting their losses. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The best part of creating this show is getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Holiday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, as well as Razza Hellem for his insights on this interview, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker and please remember to subscribe, share and rate the show to help get the word out. See you next week.