Bait, starring and created by Oscar and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed, is a mix of cultures — both the people kind and the pop kind.
To make the show, a team of creatives from around the world came together to tell the story of Ahmed’s character, Shah Latif, an actor in London wrestling with the pressures of life and his profession as rumors spread (helped along by him, of course) that he’s in the running to be the next James Bond.
Gold Derby spoke with co-showrunner Ben Karlin, editor Mark Davies, music supervisor Ciara Elwis, and composer Shruti Kumar about melding together disparate influences and elements to make something as personal as a playlist.
Gold Derby: Ben, I’d like to start with you. When you were originally paired up with Riz Ahmed, what were the first conversations like?
Ben Karlin (showrunner): The first meeting was the classic Hollywood arranged marriage situation. I was made aware that they were on the hunt for a showrunner for a project with Riz. I had never met him and worked with him, but was a fan from afar. I jumped at the opportunity to work with him, but obviously, you’ve got to meet and see if you align and if there’s a creative match there. And just right out of the gate, the themes that he wanted to do a show about and things that were important to him really spoke to me. Even though our backgrounds couldn’t be more different, I did really connect with a lot of the ideas that he wanted to put up on screen.
I’m wondering about everyone else’s first impressions of the project. Mark, when did you come aboard?
Mark Davies (editor): I came aboard a little way into the editing process. I had Episode 3 and Episode 6, and I was sort of given my episode, which was the Eid party episode, to work on over the Christmas break. It really was just, “Have a go. See what you want to do with it and show us something in the new year,” which is brilliant freedom to have. It suited me as well because I went to university with somebody who was a second generation Pakistani, and I’d been to Eid parties. I had a little bit of experience with the kind of gathering that we were working on.
Ciara and Shruti, the music on Bait is coming from many different sources. Did you two work in tandem?
Ciara Elwis (music supervisor): I was on the project first. I came on in October 2023, so quite a long time. Riz is an amazing musician, so I always knew that music was going to be a big part of this show. Then I was part of the hiring process for the composer, so in the early stages of talking about the music tone for the show, we had this amazing playlist. Riz pulled it together, and I then started contributing to it. It had a lot of vintage Lollywood stuff that ended up in there, which became a bit of a theme for us. That playlist actually went out to the composers that we were speaking to, of which obviously Shruti was one.
Shruti Kumar (composer): My entry point was I think like summer 2024, and I didn’t even know what the show was. When we got that brief, it was just a “comedy, psychological, trippy thriller about an actor.” I didn’t even know it was Riz, and I got this insane playlist with Lollywood, Bollywood, Bjork, Sophie, and Chance the Rapper. It was like my dream playlist, which is also like a huge challenge because it covered a lot of ground, but it was immediately super exciting. I wrote a demo for it through all these different genres, trying to reclaim Bond through the ages. I really gave it a big swing for that demo.
Ciara, when you get a playlist like that, how does that affect your job for a project? Is it a cheat sheet?
Elwis: It’s a really clear kind of tonal guide. Then my job is to go and find things that are, well, hopefully better. And then, things that evoke the same emotion. Musically, we really play into the trippy elements right from episode one, even before those are really introduced. It’s always very exciting when I come across things I haven’t heard, because I’ve usually heard most things, honestly, by now, so it was really cool discovering the Lollywood stuff and some of the ’70s Pakistani folk music I hadn’t heard before.
Shruti, how does a show’s pre-existing relationship with music change composing a score for it?
Kumar: The playlist was very helpful because finding the palette would have been impossible without it. I’m lucky, I grew up listening to a lot of this music, so for me, it was a very fun thing to bring in all of these influences I had grown up with as well and then create a tonal glue. What was gonna become the overarching sound? Riz is really into breathwork and he kept going back to Sufi breathing. I ended up sampling my dad breathing in. He sent me like an hour of Sufi breath patterns in the middle of the night on WhatsApp. And I ended up just like resampling them, repurposing them, putting them through pedals and amps, of like this, kind of these different versions of our own human breath.
Are there residuals for breathing on the soundtrack?
Kumar: Let’s not. We’re not. My dad is not in SAG.
Ben, Riz told me that you suggested James Bond as a theme running through the season. Was it scary loving that idea and not knowing if you could legally do it?
Karlin: It’s scary. I mean, it’s exciting. So many days, we were just like, “This is really gonna be a problem if we get a ‘no.'” But the idea felt so right. We weren’t doing a parody. We had never talked about the music needing to feel like Bond music, but we never wanted to use the actual theme. For some reason it felt like we were gonna get a “yes” as long as we were smart and as long as the show stayed true to what the spirit of it was. So yes, in retrospect, we definitely had a lot of hand-wringing about this all.
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
