Riz Ahmed says his new limited series Bait is built around a joke that becomes something sharper: a Pakistani-British actor and his family are forced to live with rumors that he has been cast as the next James Bond. The series, set to stream on Amazon Prime, mixes family drama with a public fantasy Ahmed says every character is tempted to perform.

Ahmed, an Emmy winner for The Night Of and an Oscar nominee for Sound of Metal, said the show is anchored by Shah Latif, a man who is never quite sure where the public version of himself ends and the real one begins. “I like to think I’m not as lost and as spiraling as [Shah Latif], but I definitely have that in me,” Ahmed said. “I think we all have that in us.”

That is the pull at the center of Bait. Ahmed said Latif is “projecting this public version of himself, like we all do, because we feel like we’re not good enough,” and that, in doing so, he is “looking for love in all the wrong places.” The story moves through pit-stops including the King’s Museum Gala and an Eid celebration gone wrong, while a talking pig’s head voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart turns up in regular check-ins that push the series further from straight realism without letting it drift away from family life.

Ahmed said the bilingual structure is part of what gives the show its shape. “Changing languages and code-switching in other ways is a big part of the show,” he said. “But to be honest with you, we just wrote the script, and when we turned up and started shooting it, we didn’t even discuss what would be in Urdu and what would be in English. It just happened.” He added that the cast “just all started chatting like we would as a family, dipping in and out of these different languages, and it just felt real.”

The series also brings Ahmed back alongside actors he knows well. He said Sheeba Chaddha played his mother in Aneil Karia’s Hamlet earlier in the year, while Guz Khan was someone he had known longer than he realized. Ahmed said the two first met about twenty years ago, though he had assumed it had been about six years, when he thought he first met Khan in Khan’s hometown of Coventry. “When we were on set he said ‘bro, you don’t remember the first time we met, do you?’ and I was like ‘of course I do, about six years ago’ and he was like ‘nah, we met twenty years ago,’” Ahmed said.

Bait lands at a point when Ahmed’s name already carries weight across television and film, from The Night Of to Sound of Metal. But the series is not using that reputation as the whole sell. It is leaning instead on a family story that treats rumor, language and performance as parts of the same thing: the way people present themselves when they want to be seen, and the way they fall short when the performance is all they have.

That is where Bait makes its case. The Bond rumor is the hook, but the subject underneath is older and more personal: who gets to define the self in public, and what a family does when that version starts to crack.