Add Kaos to your watchlist. It was spectacular, like a dream.” Nabhaan Rizwan is recalling swimming with Kaos co-stars Jeff Goldblum and Janet McTeer in the waters off Istria in the Adriatic at the start of a filming schedule that, for those playing gods, featured luxury yachts and five-star hotels.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m working on this incredible show, making beautiful friends, doing beautiful things’. It felt like a fitting meeting place for gods.” The 27-year-old actor and comedian, who plays Zeus’s son Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, evokes an idyllic scene, but Charlie Covell’s reinvention of the Greek myths pumps humour and horror into the Olympian idyll.
“Everyone’s rotten in this show,” Rizwan says approvingly. “It’s kind of punk in that way. Everyone cocks it up on a cosmic scale and feels the consequences.
Just when you think everything’s fine and dandy, something terrible happens, some heinous act is committed and it flips the hourglass in our world.” Dionysus’s usual duties require him to enjoy a relentless schedule of physical pleasure and indulgence, but it’s not enough any more; he wants a new challenge. “That’s where Dionysus is at when we meet him.
He’s been partying, enjoying good times and wild frenzies; living out many of people’s greatest aspirations every night of the week, and he’s incredibly bored. Dionysus doesn’t know who he is, or how deep or shallow he is. He can’t place himself among anyone in a way that’s really centred.
” His need for purpose will entangle Dionysus in a family dispute that is about to turn very unpleasant. As well as Hera, his prowling stepmother, who turns people into bees on a whim, the powerful gods Poseidon and Hades – technically his uncles – are vying for power. “My own family are pretty great,” says the actor, who was born to Pakistani parents in Essex in 1997.
His father was a playwright, his brother Mawaan a stand-up comic and star and creator of BBC3 Bafta-winning comedy Juice , which also features Nabhaan and their mother, the actor Shahnaz Rizwan. “We happen to have the same line of work, and the three of us have worked together, which is amazing. That’s one thing that Olympians don’t do – they’re all doing their own thing.
They all have their own agenda. Toxicity is the word. But there’s none of that for me, I’m very fortunate.
” Rizwan is startlingly handsome and his performance puckish and engaging – attributes not lost on Goldblum. “The first time we met he said, ‘Ah, Nabhaan, you’ve got these almondine eyes.’” In breaks in filming, Goldblum would play the piano and sing.
“I’m telling you,” says Rizwan, “if Jeff’s at the piano and you’re being serenaded, it’s a special experience.” Like his co-stars, Rizwan is intrigued by the world showrunner Covell has created, seeing it, in part, as an allegory for both present-day politics, with the gods’ self-serving and devious behaviour a direct metaphor for “our leaders, and how they can be funny and scary at the same time”. It is also, he says, a commentary on modern culture’s obsession with fame.
“I immediately thought of the advent of celebrity,” he says, of first reading Kaos scripts. “And how much attention we pay to these people, and build them up. We’re getting more and more instantaneous access into their lives and their thoughts and opinions.
That’s a kind of worship.” Was Rizwan, whose roles include Raza, one of the main characters in the 2018 BBC drama Informer , and a smaller part in Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning First World War drama 1917 (2019), at all intimidated by Goldblum’s Hollywood celebrity? “He’s my hero,” says Rizwan, who was yet to be born when the first Jurassic Park came out in 1993. “But I just love to meet whoever is in front of me.
I stick my hand out, and say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ then see where we go from there. You hope it’s a great experience and, in this case, it absolutely was. And then some.
“Like the best actors, Jeff is completely singular in everything he does. He’s a singular voice. And I really, really admire that.
And then to work with him is just pure joy. Everything he touches, this man, he turns into gold. He’s got the Midas touch.
” And what if we were to offer Rizwan the chance to live like a god? “It sounds incredibly tedious, the ennui would be overwhelming,” he says. “Eternal life doesn’t look like one of substance to me. I think we’re here for a finite time and we’re all walking the same way.
The only thing certain is the end. That sounds morbid, but I think it’s helpful. It’s a reminder to do things that are worthwhile, to really be present with your time and with your loved ones.
”.
