When I let it slip that the press kit I’d been given had referred to him as a ‘Renaissance man,’ Riz Ahmed looked angrily down into his breakfast, a chicken-quinoa bowl with extra chicken. It lasted for just a moment, but the image stayed with me, because it was the only time during our approximately 10 hours together — breakfast in Brooklyn, private sessions with the Islamic art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, YouTube sessions listening to 1970s Qawwali-inspired Iraqi disco, talks on park benches in Fort Greene, tea on the sidewalk of Fulton Avenue and even dinner in Boston, where Ahmed was filming an independent feature about a heavy-metal drummer who’s losing his hearing — that the 35-year-old actor seemed to be truly, genuinely upset.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

He arrived a few minutes late, speed-walking toward me in apologetic haste and grabbing my hand with enthusiasm. He was dressed in a gray kurta-inspired top, black slacks and a perfectly disheveled royal blue jacket with the sleeves rolled to midforearm — an ensemble that, along with the suede baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, gave him the look of a very well-read semiretired pro skateboarder. Onscreen his presence can be almost comically malleable — he can come across as pliant or stalwart, frank or cagey — but in person there is a distinct and direct energy to him, a keenness bubbling under the surface.

It comes out not only in how he talks but also in what he talks about. Tribalism, for example, which we explored at length over breakfast. “It’s a very strong instinct,” he told me from across the table at a crowded Fort Greene restaurant. “And that can be a really healthy instinct. The organization of marginalized groups relies on tribalism, to some extent. If you’re trying to move uphill against injustice, I can understand that. But when you’re already at the top of the mountain, tribalism is just a way of [expletive] on people and excluding them from power.”

Or the Mughal Empire, with which he has found himself low-key obsessed of late, and on which he just might, if you’re open to it, deliver a full-throated disquisition. “Under the Mughals, you have this multicultural empire, which is basically Muslims, Hindu majority, and there’s a certain pragmatism that comes from ... ” — here he stopped, midthesis, to re-form his thoughts — “It’s a mongrel empire, it’s a multicultural empire, and they intermarry between Hindus and Muslims. It’s like a pragmatism emerges when you have to abandon the idea of purity or a monolith, where it’s like, we just present things as they are. Then you start getting realistic depictions as opposed to idealized depictions. ... ”

On an intellectual flight like this, Ahmed seems self-assured, fueled by his knowledge and his quest for more of it. There are other moments when he feels, still, completely powerless. Like when it emerges that people are calling him a Renaissance man — which, of course, he hates. But why? He does, in fact, excel at a lot of different things. He has become a go-to actor for unique secondary characters in Hollywood spectacles, like the “Star Wars” film “Rogue One,” the Jason Bourne film “Jason Bourne” and the forthcoming Marvel film “Venom.” He has won an Emmy for his devastating lead role as an American Muslim railroaded by the criminal-justice system in HBO’s “The Night Of,” in which he mesmerized audiences with his evolution from delicate naïveté to delicate violence without ever seeming to change the expression on his face. Hollywood appears to be fully buying in: In addition to “Venom,” Ahmed stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix in the macabre western comedy “The Sisters Brothers,” opening this month; he is in preproduction for the title role in a “Hamlet” adaptation that will appear on Netflix; and he has created and sold the sweeping multigenerational immigrant-epic series “Englistan” to the BBC, with preproduction set to begin soon.

As if that weren’t enough, he’s also one half of the critically acclaimed, if niche, rap duo Swet Shop Boys and a solo artist whose 2006 song “Post 9/11 Blues,” released in the wake of the 7/7 attacks in London, was banned by some English radio stations for being too controversial. He is an Oxford graduate, a classically trained actor and maybe the only person I’ve ever seen recite a poem on an American late-night show to thunderous applause. The poem, called “Sour Times,” was delivered two nights after Heather Heyer was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and it sparked a miniwar on the Facebook page for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” over whether Fallon was divisive for introducing politics into his show.

This is another thing Ahmed takes issue with: being called political. “A lot of mainstream movies, they’re steeped in their perspective,” he told me. “Every story, every decision, who you prioritize, what your perspective is. That’s what your politics is.” He wonders too why some artists have their work labeled political while others don’t. “If you’re trying to express yourself authentically, doing that becomes somehow perceived as a struggle, as picking a fight. When really I’m just going from A to B. It’s like Ferris Bueller’s going from A to B.”

I ask him what that means.

“Ferris Bueller’s just lawless out here, man!” he says. “He’s just a white dude skipping class and being lawless.”

“Yeah,” I tell him, “I see what you’re saying.” And then I repeat the sentence, word for word, because it’s not true: I don’t actually see what he’s saying. It will be at least 24 hours before I see what he’s saying.

Rizwan Ahmed was born to Pakistani immigrants in the northwest London enclave of Wembley, a working-class South Asian, African and increasingly Polish area that, for the comprehension of New Yorkers, he compares to Jackson Heights, Queens. His father was a shipping broker. He is noticeably vague about the exact nature of his experiences in Wembley but does go so far as to admit that he got himself into some “dodgy situations” before trailing off and changing the subject. At 11 years old he was granted a government scholarship to a private school, and he ultimately attended the prestigious Merchant Taylors’ secondary school for boys, whose notable alumni include the Tudor poet Edmund Spenser, at least one archbishop of Canterbury, a former governor of the Punjab and various other commissioners of the Empire, Boris Karloff and the guy who wrote “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” On the school’s Wikipedia page, Ahmed’s name appears, alphabetically, at the top of the list.

At Merchant Taylors’ he found himself among a wave of Asian kids changing the face of — well, wait. Ahmed pauses here, breaking the flow of our interview, his voice dropping half an octave: He’s conscious of the fact that he’s told these stories before, and he doesn’t want to bore me, or come across like ... you know. Not at all, I remind him, but he pauses before going on — he found himself among a wave of Asian kids changing the formerly white face of private education. There he witnessed and experienced racism from students and teachers. “The teacher would be talking about evolution and would just wander over and stand next to the one black kid in class, gesturing to him.” It made an impression. He also found himself immersed in the stuffy, old-white-man literature that would, against his better judgment, affect him forever. Literature like the now corny World War I poems he had to study, about “No Man’s Land,” the empty, apocalyptic, unclaimed space between enemy trenches where no humans belonged. Verses like:

The man who ranges in No Man’s Land

Is dogged by the shadows on either hand

That kind of stuff, likewise, stuck with him.

He also had inspirational teachers who encouraged his talent and curiosity and, I’m guessing, insatiable energy. Teachers like Mr. Roseblade, whom Ahmed describes as seeming, even at the time, like something out of an inspirational high school movie: “He was this Jewish guy from the north, this English teacher who spoke Punjabi. He just took a lot of those kids under his wing and made us realize, like: ‘Look, you’ve got to get these credits. You’ve got to go and join the debating society. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna be able to get into a good university. Because you’re not on the rugby team, that’s for sure.’ ”

Last year, many years removed from Mr. Roseblade’s class, Ahmed found himself standing before the House of Commons, having been selected to deliver the second annual Channel 4 lecture on diversity in media. In his speech, clear and eloquent, he delivered a warning. Either let English people like him participate fully in English society, or they might just go do it with ISIS. “In the mind of the ISIS recruit, he’s a version of James Bond, right?” Ahmed asked the assembled members. “Have you seen some of those ISIS propaganda videos? They are cut like action movies. Where is the counternarrative? Where are we telling these kids that they can be heroes in our stories, that they are valued?” In watching the footage, something struck me about it: Ahmed was using the word “we” to describe the country that colonized his ancestors.

“ ‘We’ and ‘I’ changes and shifts constantly,” he conceded when I asked him about it. “That was my biggest experience going to Merchant Taylors’. Extreme code switching. The most confusing conversation is to have to talk about the colonization of our continents.” We laughed a little at the ridiculousness of sentences like “we colonized us,” or “we took us into slavery.” But then his face turned serious. “That’s what we are. We are the inheritors of the scars of Empire, but also the spoils of Empire. And that kind of inside/outside state is totally ingrained in us. Which is why, at a time like now, where everybody’s being asked to pick a side, everything is binary, it’s a confusing time to be us.”

We were sharing food, which he had all but insisted on. I had been a tad unsure about it, not certain that it was entirely professional to be digging into a subject’s meal minutes after we met. But he seemed hampered by no such considerations. “Get in there, bro,” he said, gesturing to his plate in between discussions of whether or not people of color can be gentrifiers (his black female optician did not think so) and whether or not N.W.A. was, by any definition, “conscious rap” (an argument can be made, perhaps). I felt aware of a duality. On one hand, I was a professional reporter, trying my best to look as if I belonged where I was, doing what I was doing: sharp questions, clear thinking, research prepared. On the other hand, I was a black American man hanging out with a British-Pakistani man in a white cafe in what used to be a black neighborhood, chopping it up at a high level. On the third hand, I was a writer for a national magazine sharing a platform with an international film star while we talked about all the serpentine machinations of oppression and how they’ve woven and buried themselves in the very flesh of our lives. To dig haphazardly into his plate of quinoa or not?

After breakfast we piled into an Uber headed uptown toward the Metropolitan Museum. Ahmed enlisted our driver, a nondescript white man flirting with middle age, to tell us his life story. Our guy turned out to be leaving the city: Gentrification had actually worked too well for him. An office building that he and an in-law bought for dirt cheap a few decades ago was now a fantastical source of income. What dumb luck, he insisted to us, multiple times. He had two kids. They knew technology better than all of us. Kids are smarter these days, we all agreed. Ahmed prodded him along with questions until it became clear this would simply continue until I intervened to get the interview back on track.

Instead, we were interrupted by something else. Beside us on the road there appeared a battered black jeep, on monster tires, with huge steer horns glued to either side of the hood. And a shark’s fin coming from the roof. And radioactivity stickers. And what seemed like a thousand headlights. And a personalized license plate that read “MOVE AWAY.” And while I was thinking, “LOL, New York, amirite? Back to my interview,” Ahmed was saying, “Pete” — our driver’s name, which he had clearly made a point of remembering — “pull up next to him, and let’s see exactly who this is. Let’s have a little chat quickly.” Pete obliged.

We pulled up, only to find the vehicle was being driven by an Orthodox Jew.

“Whoa!” we said, all three of us, at precisely the same time. None of us saw that coming.

Riz MC of Swet Shop Boys performing at Coachella in 2017. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella

Now Ahmed had to talk to him.

Riz (leaning over me and yelling): “Hello, brother! How you doing? That’s a really interesting car, man. Where you from?”

Man (cryptically): “Zombie Proof.”

Riz (unfazed): “O.K. Are they chasing you?”

Man: “I chase them.”

More was revealed. The man was French. He’d been in the States for five years, along with his brother. They were children’s entertainers, performers and low-key stuntmen and were in the process of making a kids’ DVD that was based, somehow, on this Zombie Proof jeep. (Their act is called “The Twins From France,” and they are available for bar mitzvahs.)

After the light turned green and we’d gone our separate ways, Ahmed was glowing, bouncing and rocking in the back seat. “None of you expected that!” he was yelling. “None of you expected it!” He seemed to consider the incongruousness of the whole scene something of a personal victory.

And he was right: I was not expecting it. I was quietly thinking about how sure I’d been that, if we pulled up alongside that truck, I’d see, somewhere on its body or its driver, a Confederate flag.

As we crawled through Midtown traffic, the conversation turned to music, a topic by which Riz Ahmed is perpetually enchanted, and as he schooled me on the history of the U.K. garage and jungle scenes, I watched him transform from a political thinker to an excited dorm-room music bro. He made me listen to the track he claims was most seminal to his entire worldview: “Original Nuttah,” by Shy FX featuring UK Apachi. It is a song better heard than described. Suffice it to say that in the early 1990s, British-Jamaicans started singing reggae melodies and rocking the mic over absurdly sped-up beats, and the results were as manic as they were marvelous. Except UK Apachi was not Jamaican. His father was Iraqi, and his mother was Indian and South African. Abdul Wahab was a British Muslim who grew up getting called “Paki” and eventually aligned himself with whatever his conception was of Native Americans to create a persona doing British-Jamaican music. And it was fire.

The conflation of things that don’t seem to many people to go together — this may be at the very core of Ahmed’s creative career. He first caught the attention of many American viewers with his enthralling turn in HBO’s “The Night Of,” as Nasir Khan, a Pakistani-American student in Queens who finds himself alone with a brutally murdered white woman after the two share a one-night stand. He has no plausible explanation for her death, and as we watch him confront this terrifying worst-case scenario, Ahmed is able to convey an innocence in the face of the abject so enthralling that it almost physically hurts to watch. But perhaps the most compelling feat is his capacity to track his character’s evolution from civilian to prisoner, as he learns how to survive on the inside while his chances of ever seeing the outside again diminish. There is a manner he has, a way he can look, quietly blinking and internally stirring, that suggests that you may never, ever find out everything that’s happening underneath the surface.

In the 2014 thriller “Nightcrawler,” Ahmed took on another role that hinged entirely on the actor’s ability to breathe life into the unspoken. Here he played a young L.A. transient who is ensnared in a job working for Jake Gyllenhaal’s ambulance-chasing news service, and it’s astonishing how faithfully Ahmed captured the laconic urban roughness endemic to young men of the region. His performance has a heartbreaking sincerity; you can feel something troubled in the character’s past, even though not a single word about it is mentioned. Something similar is true of the drug dealer Ahmed played in his second feature film, “Shifty.” It’s true even of his surprisingly affecting turn as an airhead surfer in the final season of Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” The buried secret, in that one, is that the character is completely devoid of depth — a trait that somehow, given Ahmed’s performance, manages to function as a Big Reveal. In all these roles, he doesn’t just play a type of cultural mutt but an emotional one. He’s cold where he’s expected to be warm, clean where he appears to be dirty. There is always more to him than you thought, and that always says more about you than it does about him.

Dunham took an interest in the actor after seeing his performances in “The Night Of” and in “Four Lions,” a dark comedy about a group of men trying, ineptly, to commit an act of terrorism; she calls it “as iconic and cozy a comedy as ‘Wedding Crashers.’ ” Ahmed, she says, takes his work seriously: “He’s such an academic.” She remembers how, in preparation for his time on “Girls,” he researched surfing, scouted the Montauk area and used an American accent through all five days of shooting. “Then at the end we wrapped, and he was, like, ‘Alroight, bruv, see you lata, bruv,’ back into his rude-boy deal. And people felt, like, betrayed — like, ‘We partied with him, we danced with him, we went out for lobster with him, he spoke in an American accent the whole time!’ ” She also tells me about the time she fell ill, and he left a dinner with — she thinks — like, Salman Rushdie, just to sit by her hospital bed and talk until she fell asleep. “He’s a very tenderhearted person,” she says. “I think it’s easy to forget, because he has the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world and the intensity of someone who’s an activist.”

Ahmed in a scene from ‘‘The Night Of.’' Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

In the lobby of the Met, tourists swarmed by the hundreds. It occurred to me that Ahmed was recognizable but not quite famous enough to cause a scene. Only a few people treated us to those “Wait, do I know that guy?” double takes. I was tickled by the likelihood that so many of the people in this lobby had seen Ahmed in something — opposite Felicity Jones in “Rogue One,” opposite John Turturro in “The Night Of,” opposite Matt Damon in “Jason Bourne,” opposite Lena Dunham in “Girls” — and still didn’t know that they were walking right past that guy. Is this because he is a tremendous supporting actor — one who, just as we are taught in conservatories, makes room for his scene partners, selflessly disappearing into each character until no one really notices him? Or is it because New Yorkers — Americans, for that matter, and maybe Brits as well — are simply not accustomed to seeing a slender young South Asian man in a museum lobby and thinking “That must be a celebrity”? Is it because people’s mental categories for whom they should pay attention to and whom they can ignore are such that you could quite possibly have sent out Riz Ahmed on a bicycle to deliver food to people in their apartments while they were watching “The Night Of,” and a healthy percentage of New Yorkers might have signed the credit-card receipt and closed the door without a second thought?

We had come to the Met because, in addition to being a rapper and an actor and a budding producer, Ahmed has also been spending his Sundays in one-on-one study sessions with Navina Haidar, a curator in the Met’s department of Islamic art. She led us upstairs, past various security doors and card scanners and cloistered offices into a small, cool conference room. The walls were lined with reproductions of Islamic art from eras spanning the last thousand years. While we waited to begin, Ahmed stepped out for a moment, and Haidar confided in me about why she agreed to spend her Sundays talking art with this particular movie star. “He’s got a great spirit,” she said. “Really, a moral core. And he’s intellectually very active and quite creative, and curious and very dedicated to what he’s doing.” Ahmed returned, but she didn’t stop; instead, she just turned her praise to him. “It’s been very impressive to see how you have been really dedicated to wanting to learn about this, and to have these tutorials, and really explore the subject in depth. That commitment, I think, is really inspiring for me as a curator.” Ahmed kept his eyes down, scanning the page in front of him, while she lavished him with praise, and then, when she was done, said: “She’s a G.”

Sometime around 1600, in the Ottoman court of what is now Turkey, a book was created. Perhaps it is better described as an album. In fact, it is often called the Bellini Album, after the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, who served as a point of cultural connection between Venice and the Ottoman Empire and whose portrait of Mehmet II hangs in the National Gallery in London. (He also created an image of “the East” for “the West” and as such was, in a sense, ground zero for Orientalism.) The complete origins of the Bellini Album are not entirely known. Experts suggest it cannot be attributed to Bellini himself but speculate it was so named because of the European art scattered throughout, some of which was once rumored to be Bellini’s work.

The album is, in essence, a scrapbook, each page featuring a form or piece of art, from sources all over the Ottoman Empire and beyond — Persian calligraphy, an ink-and-watercolor goose attributed to China, collages of devotional scenes attributed to Italy and the Netherlands. On one page, you find a painting of a person falling into a well; on another, a peacock whose tail is actually calligraphy, and whose calligraphy is actually a poem. There is even a page on which the disembodied head of Jesus appears on what may be the Veil of Veronica. Each page is itself a meditation on adornment, with the image in the center hemmed by borders of intricate flowers and the detailed marbling of lapis lazuli and rose. All of it without an owner, all of it a mashup of something prior. If visual symbology were music, then the Bellini Album would be a mixtape.

At one point we came across a Persian drawing of a gathering of mystics, apparently in widely varying states of emotion. Joy, fatigue, ecstasy. There were musicians in the back, men dancing sensuously by themselves on a field of flowers, some male couples locked in what could perhaps be construed as a lover’s embrace. Ahmed was so excited about the image that he jumped out of his seat. This is what he was looking for. “Look!” he exclaimed. “The uncles,” he said — the colloquial term for conservative Muslim elders — “the uncles and Fox News tell us that this doesn’t exist. But it’s right here. It’s right here.” He paused for a moment to take it all in. “They’re having a rave, bro! It’s the ‘Original Nuttah’ but in 16th-century Iran.”

Ahmed was 18 years old on 9/11, and he saw it change everything for his community. “In the ’80s we were called black, at least politically black,” he says. “In the ’90s we were ‘Pakis.’ But after 9/11, suddenly we were Muslims.” It did not surprise him that hatred toward Asian immigrants spiked after the attacks, but what happened among his friends and family did surprise him. “What you start getting is this rising conservatism of the Muslim community in Britain. People’s parents used to watch Zee TV” — an Indian entertainment channel — “now they’re watching Islam Channel. I saw so many people who used to be D.J.s, rude boys. They chopped up their vinyl, grew beards. So you had the retreat of British Muslims from culture post-9/11. Because people all have to pick a side.”

What made that transition particularly tough for Ahmed was that, in the ’90s, it seemed to him that British South Asians were enjoying a kind of aspirational freedom. The economy was good. It was O.K. to live well. The South Asian sketch-comedy show “Goodness Gracious Me” was enjoying huge success. South Asian culture was rippling into U.K. music, as well, in genres like bhangra and jungle and with pop acts like Cornershop. There was something of a multicultural moment for British South Asians. Growing up, Ahmed believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.

But he soon found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events. Ahmed also performed as a vocalist with a 12-member jazz/electro/drum ’n’ bass ensemble called “Confidential Collective.”

He invited me back to the apartment he was subletting in Fort Greene, in a spacious brownstone with hardwood floors and sunny high ceilings. There was at least one other roommate floating around. It seemed strange to think that Riz Ahmed had just found a room sublet on Craigslist, or whatever, but that seemed to be the case. He wanted me to hear music — not the music he was making, necessarily, but the music he was thinking about, that was inspiring him.

Ahmed takes issue with being labeled political. ‘‘If you’re trying to express yourself authentically,’' he says, ‘‘doing that becomes somehow perceived as a struggle, as picking a fight.’' Sharif Hamza for The New York Times

First, though, he wanted to eat. “Are you hungry again, bro?” he asked, rooting around in the stainless-steel fridge for leftovers. Eventually he emerged with his arms full of treats and quickly assembled a spread: muhammara from Damascus Bread & Pastry Shop, houmous bi tahini from Sahadi’s, cheeses, chocolates, nuts. Then he perched over the open flame of the stove, heating up pitas and handing me pieces while we talked.

He had been to Pakistan recently and wanted to show me pictures. He was fascinated by the posters and civic announcements wheat-pasted on city walls, and how their chaos mimicked the art we’d seen at the museum. He showed me pictures of himself with khwaja-sira (sometimes called hijras), the transgender or third-gender people whose identity Pakistan recognized as an official category all the way back in 2009. He told me how he’d felt both at home there and also completely out of place, a true Londoner. He showed me YouTube videos of Persian and Iraqi singers and explained how they were mashing up traditions, the effect sometimes hilarious, sometimes profound. He delighted in explaining the tonal links between the rambling, sometimes bawdy lyrics sung in Qawwali music and the rambling narcocorridos of Mexico. He showed me a video he’d been shooting for his next film project — nothing yet, he insisted, just an experiment, an idea on how you might capture the feeling of the Pakistani diaspora. We watched together in silence: close-ups of faces, lingering moments, the camera seeming to capture so much about its subjects in mere silhouettes.

He also looked for connections between the two of us, adroitly comparing and contrasting the black American experience and the British-Pakistani one. The quest for him, it seemed, was to prove that although people have a hard time seeing certain things as connected, reality has a much more expansive view. “His thing” is to make everything his thing. Or perhaps that’s not quite right: He is not out to co-opt the world to him. Rather, he is looking to elbow out a space for himself in the world, to prove that it should exist.

I asked him what kind of art he liked the most in the Islamic collection. It was not the meticulously crafted objects, carved by hand, floral patterns seeming to move as fluids, and it wasn’t the deeply attentive nature drawings, each barb of the feather’s vane painted with microscopic care, sometimes by a brush made, according to legend, with a single hair. These he found beautiful. But they were not his favorites; the miniatures were. “I don’t know whether it’s my own weird way of looking at things,” he told me at the museum, “but what I really appreciate about lots of miniatures and lots of things like this is, you get a God’s-eye view. You get the schematic.” Details are nice. But for him the best way to see anything is to see everything.

In an odd way it made me reflect on “Cashmere,” the first LP from Ahmed’s Swet Shop Boys project. (His opposite number in that duo, Himanshu Suri, is from Queens, and sounds like it; Ahmed is from London, and sounds like it; and yet somehow they also sound like they’re from South Asia, only by way of Jamaica, and also by way of a sweat-filled Brixton rave in 1999, and finally by way of a musty bedroom, a lone red lamp, a laptop and a severe lack of sleep.) On this album, Ahmed wrote a song, “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” the title perhaps a reference to the British-Indian singer Susheela Raman’s 2003 fusion track “Half Shiva Half Shakti.” In it, he delivers three verses mostly about not quite fitting in anywhere — or, depending on how you look at it, fitting in just a little everywhere.

The first two are straightforward evocations of his past: “My only heroes were black rappers/So to me, Tupac was a true Paki.” On the third, though, he does something different. He addresses himself from four different perspectives, four different ways he is interpreted and received, attacked and praised. First there’s the grateful South Asian fan (“Our young ones need someone like you to look up to”). Then he embodies the voice of someone calling him a “terrorist Paki” and a weak rapper. Then comes a young rap fan, saluting him in a mix of Asian and Caribbean argots (“Salaam, wagwan bruv”) and says “because of you I went to uni” — and, last, a disgruntled elder who warns him that he’s going to hell “for the sex and the swearing” and should obey the Quran. All of this in one dizzying verse, each voice rushing in to replace the last.

The first time I heard this, it struck me so deeply that I paused the song and sat quietly. The verse was simple: It was just four different ways people look at you. But the reason it unraveled something so deeply inside of me was that it also represented four different ways you can look at yourself. All completely opposite one another, and completely isolated, and yet completely validated by the world you live in. And when there are so many versions of self, maybe the only way to maintain safety is to develop a view that can see, literally, everything.

A few weeks later, we met in Boston. Ahmed was running late, having spent all day on the set of the forthcoming film “The Sound of Metal.” In it, he plays a rock drummer who is losing his hearing. He had been learning sign language, practicing drumming and, as he does, just generally molding himself into the role — or rather, accessing the part of him that already was the role.

I watched him bouncing into the restaurant wearing a string backpack, his hair dyed blond and gelled into a mid-aughts pop-punk fauxhawk. By this, our third meal, we had our food-sharing thing down to a science, both of us sitting at the same corner of the table so we could eat fish and vegetables from the same plate. Ahmed seemed more reflective this time, the pauses longer, the listening deeper. It occurred to me that he may have been a touch nervous the first time we met. He’d been wondering, naturally, if anything he said during that meeting made him come off like a wanker, but he had soothed himself by focusing on the bigger goal. “I’m concerned with how we use an opportunity like this to say things that matter,” he told me. “I think of an interview like this as much less about what you draw of me as a person, and I think more about ... how are we using this moment, this rope, how are we pulling this in the right direction.”

The “right direction,” for him, is to expand the definitions of everything until the definitions are true. He does not want to do away with categories; he wants them to be big enough and veritable enough to include reality. He wants them to encompass No Man’s Land. For him, the choice is clear: Either you are in the middle alone or you are in the middle and therefore a part of everything. People don’t expect zombie jeeps to be driven by Orthodox Jews from France, but they are; people don’t expect to see a rave in old Persian art, but there it is. You don’t expect a South Asian actor to be in blockbusters, westerns, Shakespeare, hip-hop and TV about immigrant families, but there he is, because these are not separate strains of the culture — they are all one thing, and that thing is him.

Ahmed is still doing independent films, because he loves the genre, loves the work. But he is also hoping for bigger and bigger opportunities. He has talked about playing James Bond, if for no other reason than the sense of arrival such a casting would represent — an acceptance of the fact that Riz Ahmed, in all his contradictory glory, is in no way a contradiction. He is a human and a Brit and capable of being seen as a hero.

This, I finally figured out, is why he objects to the term “Renaissance man.” The Renaissance man is a genre, a marketing category, a statistical outlier, a novelty act, the One Who Does It All. This is not how Ahmed wishes to be seen. He does not do it all. He is it all. Everything that God and Pakistan and England and Wembley and Oxford and freestyle battles and Shakespeare conservatory have made him. And if he is, then so, perhaps, are you.