Riz Ahmed tells PEOPLE he gave the Academy Award he won in 2022 to his mother and notes that he does not exactly know where the statuette lives today
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Ahmed and his frequent collaborator, Aneil Karia, won Best Live Action Short Film at the 2022 Oscars; they re-teamed for the new movie adaptation of Hamlet
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Hamlet is in theaters now
It's been four years sinceRiz Ahmedwon an Oscar, and he tells PEOPLE his mom keeps the trophy among her prized possessions.
"I went and handed it straight to my mom. She gets first dibs on any of that stuff," Ahmed, 43, says of the coveted statuette while reflecting on his experience at the 2022Academy Awards. "I actually haven't seen it for a while, so I'm hoping she knows where it is, 'cause I don't."
Ahmed and filmmaker Aneil Karia won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for their work on the shortThe Long Goodbyeat that year's Academy Awards ceremony. Four years later, Ahmed and Karia re-teamed for their new movie adaptation of William Shakespeare'sHamlet.
"She doesn't like me rearranging her stuff," Ahmed adds, regarding where his mother may keep his Oscar trophy. "It's a very kind of elaborate scheme. She's hidden it in a place where I don't know, just that I don't throw away any of the stuff. I might throw out a box that has it in it or something."
The Long Goodbyesaw Ahmed play a man spending time with his family in London while they watch a violent far-right political protest play out on TV; by the end of the 12-minute movie, that political violence comes to their neighborhood when men with guns invade their home and assault the family members. Ahmed revisitsThe Long Goodbye's setting — the same neighborhoods he lived in growing up in England's capital — in both the adaptation ofHamletand his new Prime Video series,Bait.
"These markers of external validation, they are wonderful as tokens of encouragement and affirmation," Ahmed tells PEOPLE, when asked what's changed in his life and career ever since he won an Oscar. "We're all sensitive when we put ourselves out there, we kind of try and share a private and vulnerable part of ourselves when we're telling stories, so having that encouragement and seeing those things, they're quite fleeting, you know."
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Ahmed heads his own production company,Left Handed Films. Aside fromHamletandBait, he most recently appeared in last year'sThe Phoenician Scheme, and he has a role in Tom Cruise's upcoming comedy,Digger, which hits theaters in October. When asked if he feels he's developed more "agency" over his career in recent years, Ahmed notes that control over his work is something "we have to fight for."
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"WithHamlet, it's the first non-whiteHamletin the history of cinema, or withBait, I don't think there's quite been a story told like that. I don't say that to pat myself on the back. I say that to say that it's really hard getting some of those things made if there isn't a kind of clear, obvious template to point towards if you're trying to do things that aren't formulaic," Ahmed says of the chances he's taken with his recent projects, with a laugh.
"It's something that you have to really kind of fight tooth and nail for," he adds. "You have to kind of go to war for it, you know? And more often than not, not even just convincing others, it's about convincing yourself that it's not a fool's errand."
Hamletis in theaters now, andBaitis streaming on Prime Video.
Read the original article onPeople