The 'Sound of Metal' actor opens up about the identity of his novelist wife as he talks about their first meeting and low-key wedding ceremony last year amid pandemic.
- January 15, 2021
AceShowbiz - Riz Ahmed is married to novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza.
The actor let slip earlier this week he had recently tied the knot, and he has now revealed further details of his nuptials, which were "super intimate and socially distanced" amid the coronavirus pandemic, and he was glad not to have "500 aunties" in attendance.
"Obviously, kept it super intimate, and socially distanced. There was just like, hardly anyone there really," he said as he appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Wednesday night (13Jan21).
"We did it in a backyard, which is nice in lots of ways. I think the nicest thing about it was you didn't have 500 aunties hanging around you, pinching your cheeks."
"The Four Lions" star joked, "No disrespect to the aunties, but Asian weddings are big. You always got these people crawling out the woodworks, who I think are kind of probably imposters. They just smell the kebabs on the street and just wander in."
Riz admitted he didn't intend to keep his wedding a secret, it just hadn't come up in conversation before.
"It's a weird one, isn't it?" he smiled. "I guess because we live in a social media age if you don't, like, get on the megaphone about stuff it's like, it's a secret - but I never know how much is oversharing."
Riz met "A Place for Us" writer Fatima while he was preparing for his role as a deaf heavy metal drummer in 2019 movie "Sound of Metal" and admitted the period around the motion picture was "life-changing" for him.
"She's an amazing novelist. We met so randomly while I was preparing for this role, for Sound Of Metal when I was in New York," he recalled. "We both sat down at the same table in the cafe where we both turned up to write. We were both jostling over the same laptop plug points, like a very modern way of meeting."
"And we struck up a friendship and reconnected down the line. But it's weirdly like one of the many things about preparing for this role that was so special, it just brought a lot of goodness into my life."
"Obviously I met Fatima for the first time and met so many people in the deaf community that have become friends. There's just something about this whole period around this film that was kind of life changing."
