‘Best Actor’ nominee Riz Ahmed touches on the importance of diversity in Hollywood

Best Actor nominee Riz Ahmed recently sat down for a chat and candidly dished over the importance of having diversity in the Hollywood award pool.

The actor got candid during an interview with MSNBC and started off by addressing his 2016 quip about no one resembling him in an audition room.

He was quoted saying, “it’s really interesting because progress is sometimes not liner. If you kinda go back decades you had actors like Omar Sharif playing a lead role in epics and mainstream Hollywood.”

“If you think about that and then compare that to where we are now you could say we made progress, you could say we are back to where we need to be.”

“I believe you’ve never really arrived at a destination, there is always further to go. Yes it’s great to see that we’ve got some Asian actors that are nominated this year.”

“But we need to go further because there is always further to go. plus with someone like me who for a lot of my life was thinking about the representation of brown people or ethnic minorities or muslims, it was eye opening to realize ‘hang on a minute there is this whole other world that we need to open up to representing, for e.g. the deaf community, the disabled community’. "