Mawaan Rizwan on clowning round, profitable Baftas and the surreal new sequence of Juice: ‘If it’s not your present, cool, don’t watch it’ | Tv

I don’t know if I’ve even actually celebrated it to be sincere, man.” Sitting in a north London bar on a boiling sizzling night, resplendent in an identical silk shirt and shorts combo, Mawaan Rizwan is considering his life post-Bafta. In May final 12 months, he gained finest male comedy efficiency for Juice, his gloriously surrealist BBC sequence through which he stars as Jamma, a clownish manchild with a bowl minimize navigating a chaotic life alongside his dysfunctional household and buttoned-up older boyfriend.

In the tip, after a couple of sips of his negroni, Rizwan – whose CV additionally contains appearances on Taskmaster, Live on the Apollo and Doctor Who, plus a slew of comedy songs about racism, poisonous masculinity and snowboarding’s lack of socioeconomic variety – pinpoints a method his life has modified; his therapist upped his price. Rizwan speculates that it may need occurred after his viral acceptance speech, through which the shocked and elated actor recounted a previous session’s give attention to the hazards of counting on exterior types of validation.

“I’ve spent a lot of my adult life trying to prove myself so that I can be clapped by people, like: ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe you’re not a loser,’” the 34-year-old says with a smile. “I thought winning an award shouldn’t feel good according to everything I’m talking about in therapy … But it feels fantastic.” Shortly after his win, awkward conversations have been had in his therapist’s workplace. “It was the elephant in the room because I reckon he saw the fucking speech,” Rizwan laughs.

Like his onscreen creation, Rizwan has the power to flit between silliness, sincerity and disappointment within the blink of an eye fixed. When I ask why his dad doesn’t star in Juice, like his mum and brother do, he falls silent. Then simply when it feels as if he’s getting ready to opening up about their relationship, he switches to joke mode: “I didn’t want to be like Trump, just giving out jobs to my family. Plus, being completely honest, my dad’s CV wasn’t good enough.” Today Rizwan’s power can also be spiked by tiredness; he arrived 10 minutes late for the interview, having simply completed the edit on Juice sequence two, and appears able to collapse. “This show is a lot, man,” he sighs. “I care about it so deeply. But the downside to that is I don’t have a life.”

Thankfully, the laborious work has paid off. While sequence one had myriad visible flights of fancy – Jamma tucking into his boyfriend Guy’s arm after it remodeled right into a cake; an orgasm in a pub rest room punctuated by a jet of glitter – it was nonetheless anchored in the true world. Influenced by the playful aesthetics of administrators reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Michel Gondry and Sorry to Bother You’s Boots Riley, the extra supernatural sequence two takes place in a miniature Juice Town. It’s a world of tactile sponge-like fantasias, intricate home interiors made fully of cardboard, and sperm-soaked sofas mistaken for contemporary artwork. Its gothic, mist-strewn streets are haunted by a mysterious mystic-slash-vape salesman (performed by Kevin Eldon) who trades souls, whereas an emotional scene involving Jamma’s dad’s journey to the UK is retold utilizing shadow puppets and an egg.

First carried out at Edinburgh pageant fringe as a frenetic one-man present greater than a decade in the past, it took some time to persuade folks that Juice might work on tv. “There’s a certain way of making British comedy, and if you’re trying to make a show that’s not [like something else] on TV already, that’s a huge risk,” Rizwan says. That threat was heightened by a TV business contending with monetary and political pressures. “I think people are scared,” he says. “Politically, we’re in a very tumultuous time. And that’s the time when art needs to be the most daring, the most honest, the most bold. But on a systemic level and on a commercial level, it’s also a time of austerity, where money tightens, so we often get this paradox: people need to make art that’s more honest, but commissioners want to make stuff that’s a surefire hit. It’s just a hard time for people who want to challenge expectations because everything is a fight.”

Ultimately, he’s conscious that not everybody will like Juice and its superb phantasmagoria and oddball in-jokes (Jamma and his finest buddy, Winnie, can typically be discovered “smoking” Chipsticks, for instance). “If this is not your show, cool, don’t watch it,” Rizwan says. “But if this is your show, the idea is that you become obsessed with it, because it’s a squidgy, almost edible world that feels tangible and sensory.”

Despite the familial solid checklist – Jamma’s flighty artist brother Isaac is performed by Rizwan’s real-life youthful brother Nabhaan, who has additionally starred in Netflix’s Kaos and the crime drama Informer; his mom, Shahnaz, stars as pissed off matriarch Farida – Rizwan is at pains to level out that Juice’s narrative arc of self-acceptance isn’t utterly autobiographical. “I know monetising our trauma is the ‘in’ thing in our culture, but sometimes it’s not always helpful,” he laughs. “I wanted Juice to feel truthful and personal, but I wanted it to just fly into avenues that are beyond my limited life experience.”

There are particular connections, nonetheless, not least the truth that sequence two finds Jamma turning into an expert clown. When Rizwan was 23, he enrolled at a clown faculty simply exterior Paris for a month (it was all he might afford). It modified his life. “We would learn about how everyone in the circus has a skill – there’s a fire-breather, there’s a contortionist – but the clown has no skill whatsoever but his stupidity,” he says. “They’re so lovable but so tragic, and that’s an interesting character trait. Jamma has so many of those qualities.” Rizwan is reckoning along with his frequent impulse to “use comedy as a way to get love, make people laugh” by making himself “the butt of the joke. There comes a point in your life when maybe that doesn’t serve you, but you still do it because it’s a habit.”

Born in Pakistan, Rizwan, like Jamma, moved to the UK as a baby along with his mum (“a powerhouse who never takes no for an answer”). While the household initially struggled – “Mum had a really tricky decade of migration battles and economic struggles,” is how Rizwan places it – their house was a hub of creativeness and creativity. They have been typically in their very own bubble, a world that had its personal sayings, together with one that may affect the title of Rizwan’s present. “My mum used this phrase: ‘When life gives you mangoes, make mango juice,’” he smiles. “She genuinely thought that was the phrase. So I thought that, too. When the Lemonade album came out, I assumed Beyoncé had got it wrong.”

As a teen, Rizwan made comedy house movies, which he’d add to YouTube. He quickly observed that the movies that co-starred his mum, a former baby actor in Pakistan, would get essentially the most views. Eventually, Rizwan acquired a name from a Bollywood producer asking to talk to her. “So, weirdly, she came full circle and she got to act again.”

While his mum was persevering with along with her appearing dream, Rizwan eschewed college in favour of working and going to an arts school. It was throughout a visit to the Edinburgh fringe that he realised various comedy was his calling. “It opens your eyes,” he says of the pageant. “I did Edinburgh fringe eight years in a row, in every kind of dingy venue you can think of: corridors, buses, toilets, on a dancefloor shouting over the Vengaboys. It taught me how to play to any kind of audience.” He mentions one punter who threw a Subway sandwich at him: “It was 10pm – what were they even doing having dinner that late?” The early standup model of Juice would typically discover Rizwan reflecting on his lengthy and winding journey to success (one among his first appearing roles concerned him dressed as SpongeBob, handing out flyers at a buying centre), whereas evaluating it to his household’s, notably his mum’s, nearly unintended profession ascension.

As he climbed the standup ranks, when he was 24, Rizwan introduced a documentary for the BBC referred to as How Gay Is Pakistan? through which he explored queer life in his start nation. “I was trying to process a lot at that point,” he says. “But also a part of me was just trying to get it out of the way. The two most obvious things in terms of identity the industry kept telling me about were my queerness and my Pakistaniness. So it was a way of doing something that was super brash and bold and saying: ‘Well, there you go’. Also it was me trying to understand a part of the world and a part of my history that I felt I wasn’t given access to.” He pauses. “And I thought: Well, let’s do that on taxpayers’ money!” He recognises it was useful to lots of people, however says he gained’t return to documentaries: “I definitely enjoy the nuances and subtleties I’m able to have in scripts, over a documentary that sometimes feels heavy-handed.”

Juice is filled with huge themes reminiscent of id, class and social mobility, however its presentation retains issues mild, smuggling in subjects reminiscent of abandonment by way of a plotline involving a father or mother rental web site referred to as DaddyDays4LonelyGays.com (sadly not actual). Every second of pathos is spiked by a visible gag or a surreal tangent, which makes the entire thing extra shifting. “Juice was the first show where I combined the clowning and the physicality and the dance and the songs and the singing and the vulnerable stories and the confessional stuff,” Rizwan says. “It somehow all just worked.”

The use of the previous tense, plus sequence two’s neatly wrapped closing episode, results in an apparent closing query: will there be a Juice sequence three? Rizwan sighs. He says he’s eager to give attention to music subsequent, and never simply comedy songs however one thing extra severe. Besides, he’s too drained to consider the long run and would quite sit within the second for a bit. “It was a fucking long journey, man,” he says of his profession, cocktail now drained. “I took the scenic route and it’s made me a better artist for it.”

Season two of Juice begins on 18 September on BBC iPlayer and BBC Three.