Riz Ahmed has added another great performance to his already stacked resume, with his version of Hamlet being among the latest of 2026 movie releases. The Sound of Metal Oscar nominee has been wanting to make his own take on William Shakespeare’s legendary tragedy since he was a teenager, and now that it’s here, he spoke to CinemaBlend about reimagining the famous “To Be Or Not To Be” Speech.
The new version of Hamlet gives it a South Asian context with Riz Ahmed playing a man from a wealthy family living in modern-day London, dealing with the recent death of his father. The centerpiece of the film has to be when Ahmed delivers his own version of “To Be Not To Be” while behind the wheel of a sports car after committing one of Hamlet’s famous murders. Here’s what the actor said about his version of the speech:
We had this interpretation of ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, which is that it's not about suicide. It's normally performed in that way where it's about someone considering whether or not they should end their life. But actually, if you really just look at the language rather than looking at the traditional way it is performed, the language is asking a much more confronting question which is, ‘Do we have the courage to fight back against what's wrong, even if it means we might be killed?’
Ahmed had a different interpretation of the speech from the way it’s typically presented to the audience, and used this to his advantage while on the film. As he continued in our interview:
Article continues belowThe speech is a game of chicken… Hamlet's daring himself and rousing himself into taking this leap, then we need to film it as a game of chicken. And so, he's driving down a freeway 100 miles an hour towards something much bigger than himself 'cause he had the courage to take it on and to stay his course. And so, it was in a way quite literal in how we're trying to do it.
It’s an excellent idea to turn up the heat for the “To Be Or Not To Be” speech for the medium of film, but as he described, shooting his vision for the independent film posed one big challenge for the sequence when it came to the day on set. In his words:
Honestly filming it was interesting because I thought, ‘Okay, great, we've got this urgent interpretation on it. We'll have like four minutes to do it, right?' Usually, the speech runs like anything between five and 10 minutes. We had 2 minutes, 42 seconds because we couldn't find a stretch of freeway that we could shut down within a movable distance to our London shoot. And I was like, ‘Wow, amazing. It's even more urgent than I realized.’ He can't stop the play to have a chat with the audience. He's in the thick of the action. So it was interesting. It's often how the curse becomes the gift. The limitation can open something up for you.
How wild is that? After already condensing the speech (and entire play to be a two-hour movie), Riz Ahmed and the production team realized he’d have to condense it even more to shoot the scene on the day. It certainly makes for a high-octane version of the speech that’s much more exciting and urgent than we’ve possibly ever seen Hamlet.
The new Hamlet movie is helmed by Aneil Karia, who previously worked with Riz Ahmed on their Oscar-winning short, The Long Goodbye. It also stars the likes of Timothy Spall, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s Morfydd Clark and Joe Alwyn.
Along with Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet movie, the British actor has been all over the place recently, such as for his new show Bait, as Severus Snape for Audible’s version of the Harry Potter books and as one of the first hosts for Saturday Night Live UK. Hamlet is now playing in theaters!
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