Riz Ahmed is now a Wes Anderson featured player.
The actor, last seen in Apple’s love drama Fingernails, has joined the roster of acclaimed auteur’s latest project, an untitled feature that is now shooting in Berlin.
Plot details are being kept under the breast pocket but it is shaping up to be another ensemble piece with several of his usual cadre of artists.
Benicio del Toro and Bill Murray are also on the call sheet for the project. The feature has a script from Anderson and Roman Coppola, who has worked on five of the filmmaker’s films. Michael Cera, also cast in the picture, is among the other Anderson first-timers.
The project was at one point eying a fall 2023 start but the twin strikes last year pushed the start of production.
The feature has no distributor at this stage although Anderson’s previous outing, 2023’s Asteroid City, was released by Focus Features.
Ahmed has shown his versatility going back and forth from gritty indies to large studio blockbusters. He earned an Oscar nomination for his tour de force performance in the acclaimed drama Sound of Metal and he won the Academy Award for best live action short film in 2022 for The Long Goodbye.
He also appeared in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Sony’s Marvel movie Venom, and the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Nightcrawler. He won an Emmy for his turn in the mini-series The Night Of.
Ahmed, who starred in Fingernails with Jeremy Allen White and Jessie Buckely, is repped by WME and attorneys Tara Kole and Danny Passman.
