Riz Ahmed Quotes

My only goal as a comedian was to stomp the life out of the model-minority myth.

I've played roles that aren't expected of an Asian.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

I think the whole stigma of 'black movies' is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like '12 Years A Slave,' to 'The Butler,' to 'The Best Man,' to 'Ride Along,' to even 'Think Like a Man' from last year - these movies are just good movies.

It was trying to break down the stereotypes and it was the kind of thing where, for the first time, women were on a par and not seen as just objects. Though girls were objectified still.

I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'

One of my personal plights in this business is about playing 'The Sassy Black Girl.'

Yeah, I'm sure there are stereotypes of Asian people.

Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.

In America, I am brown; I'm 'of colour', so I would be offered Latin roles, and I've fought against that. I don't want to be put in a category, to be just offered the same sort of thing. For me, it's all about different roles, telling the stories of the great writers.

It's an ongoing joke that a black man is always the first one to get killed in movies.

'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.

What I don't like to see is when models of different races come in and out of fashion.

Nowadays, people always say, how come he's doing such young shows? But they never mention The Mod Squad. I was very proud of that show. It's the first time an African-American guy kissed a white girl.

There's not enough black films out there. There's not enough Latin films, or films that have an Asian, Indian or Middle Eastern lead. The list goes on and on.

When I started coming to the U.S., they were offering me only the typical stereotypical roles: the druggard, the criminal, the gang member, or in the best-case scenario, the gardener or the cook. I was fed up with all these roles that were always the same. And I promised I would try to change the image of Latinos in Hollywood.

One of the things I like about comedy in general is that it affords Asian Americans the opportunity to not be noble.

I never thought fashion was the job for me, because I'm Japanese. Clothes! That was a European, society thing.

As an actor, you just like to be able to play as much range. I just want to be invisible. I want to be able to be perceived as an artist as opposed to 'a black actor': that's the joy.

When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn't long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn't do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.

Black people, if I may, we don't get a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things outside the norm, outside of what is expected of us. Black women on Broadway are expected to put themselves downstage center and tear the roof off.

A beard and a turban sometimes conjure up negative associations, but if you see someone with a lime-colored, bright orange or pink turban, it disarms people's stereotyped notion of this image.

It's very hard as an Asian actress to get seen for anything which isn't specifically Asian in England.

I don't want to perpetuate a stereotype. I don't want to take Asian representation backwards two steps. I don't want to be part of the problem.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.