Ayla Ruby
The name’s Karlin, Ben Karlin, and as the co-showrunner of the comedy BAIT, he’s licensing a whole new kind of creative thrill. In this interview, the self-proclaimed Riz Ahmed superfan reveals how a casual chat about Ahmed’s real-life brush with James Bond completely reshaped the series. Karlin talks about balancing comedy and authentic drama in the Prime Video series, detailing everything from getting Sir Patrick Stewart on board to voice a talking pig’s head with a spectacular death scene, to writing a perfect, non-assimilationist “brother-cousin” foil specifically for Guz Kahn. Read ahead for the full chat.
Ayla Ruby: Hi. It’s wonderful to meet you.
Ben Karlin: Great to meet you.
Ayla Ruby: I just watched the show again and it’s fantastic, so congratulations.
Ben Karlin: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Ayla Ruby: No problem. I’d love to know what drew you to Bait, why this story? How did you come on board? What’s that process like?
Ben Karlin: I really came on board as just a Riz Ahmed super fan.
Ayla Ruby: Aren’t we all?
Ben Karlin: My manager said, “Hey, would you be interested in meeting with Riz about this show that he wants to do for Amazon?” And I was like, “Yeah.” When you get involved with these projects, you look for what is the thing that’s really exciting about it? Is it a piece of underlying material? Is it a piece of talent? Whatever it is. There has to be something. And Riz just made it instantly like, “I definitely want to hear more and definitely want to see what he has in mind.”
And we sat down and there was just a very quick meeting of the minds about tone. And the show didn’t really have a shape when we first met. It just was a lot of ideas loosely based on his experience and his life and a strong point of view. And what I love doing as a collaborator and as a showrunner is just getting under the hood and talking. We talked before we had writers, before we had anything besides just ourselves in a room, we just talked and gave a shape to the show and then figured out, okay, what is our story engine and how are we going to tell this story in a way that’s going to be digestible? And that’s the most fun part for me is just having those creative explosions that when you work with someone who you just jive with.
Ayla Ruby: I love that. And I have a lot of questions about collaboration and how that works. But I also want to know, was it always going to be Bond, and why is that the perfect vehicle for this?
Ben Karlin: No, it wasn’t going to be Bond. In fact, when I first met with Riz, there was no Bond element at all and there was this more, like a bigger tapestry. I think between the first and second episode, there was a multi-year time jump or something.
Ayla Ruby: That’s very different than the four days, I guess.
Ben Karlin: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, that’s what I really … I had come from doing some shows that had some compressed timelines and were doing some genre elements. And I really found coming from the world of comedy that it was this little trick that it just shoots your story through with stakes and urgency and all these things that, oftentimes, comedy doesn’t really have. So I really had been having a good time blending those genres. So I was looking for something like that to just give it some shape. And just in talking with Riz, he had mentioned anecdotally apropos of nothing that he had briefly been in the Bond conversation, and I just seized on that and I was like, “That’s the show.” That is the show. It’s something that is the perfect aspirational symbol. Everybody understands it. It’s fun. It’s kind of sexy.
And also, you can get into a little bit of that conversation about who owns those roles and what would happen in real life if someone like Riz was actually in the running for that and how would people feel about that? Not just the obvious angry Rose, but how do people feel like inside your own community and inside your own family? And it just gave birth to all of these really exciting and interesting ideas. And then obviously, an audition and a callback, and are you going to get the role? Those are just fun, stakesy things that you can build a show around.
So before we had a writing staff, we came upon this structure, and then it just became a question of whether we were going to get permission to do it because that’s a whole other thing. When you’re dealing with this priceless IP, obviously, you just can’t do it. You have to really go hat in hand and ask permission, especially because Amazon was in a tricky position. They had the rights, but they didn’t have the final say, yet. That part hadn’t happened yet. It was still with Barbara Broccoli, the longtime producer of Bond.
Ayla Ruby: Well, I’ve read a little bit about how you approached her and getting that permission, but I want to go back before that even because you had these episodes, right? Did you have the writers on board before you guys had permission? Because you have some amazing writers, too, for these episodes.
Ben Karlin: Yeah, no, we had gone really far down the road of just having it be Bond. And we always talked about how it really was going to suck if we couldn’t use Bond.
Ayla Ruby: Was there a plan?
Ben Karlin: Then it becomes, it’s like, Dean Blunt, and you’re making up an alternative universe. It’s just not as much fun, but we really wanted to make sure we had our head around what it was and knew what we were going to be asking. And Amazon was very supportive, but they were like, “Listen, you’re the ones who are going to have to go get this permission. We can’t do that for you.” Riz had a preexisting relationship with Barbara because of the fact that he was in this conversation. I think because we had a thoughtful approach to it and because it wasn’t a parody, we weren’t making fun of Bond. We were doing a somewhat serious but also fun exploration tangentially about the character, but it really wasn’t about Bond. That was just this frame, and she got that. She totally got that.
So we got really far, we had multiple scripts written and the whole series broken, in terms of structure and what we wanted to do. And it would’ve been a big, big problem and bummer if she said no.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah. There are so many layers to this. You mentioned Bond isn’t really the story, and there’s family, there’s just identity, there’s a lot of stuff that’s, there’s the comedy, but then there’s this all really deep stuff that’s just amazing to see. How do you balance the comedy, like the pigs had the comedy, and then the deeper stuff.
Ben Karlin: Yeah. In a weird way, because you’re doing this work from a point of view of a character, we knew we wanted it to be able to whiplash between being very funny, but also being very serious. And it was exciting to us to figure out, can we get those moments really, really close up to each other? Things that you’re not sure exactly how you’re supposed to feel is like, that’s very exciting as a writer, as a creative person to create those moments. I’d done this movie called 50/50 a few years back and we had some moments. It was a cancer comedy, and there was some moments in that movie where you’re supposed to be laughing, but also he’s got cancer and he’s in the hospital and he’s sick, but he’s taking some pot to ease the chemo, but he’s seeing dead bodies and you just had no idea what you were supposed to feel.
When you have those moments, it’s very exciting, creatively, because it feels like something new and dangerous. So we knew we wanted to get some of that feeling in there. And because Riz is such an incredible dramatic actor, we didn’t worry about us being able to deliver on the drama. It was just really about how can we find the tone comedically. We didn’t want it to be too silly, we didn’t want it to be too broad. We wanted it to be sharp. We wanted to make sure the targets were well-chosen. We wanted to make sure the family felt authentic and not like caricature.
The hardest thing about these shows is tone. It’s like the hardest thing. It’s just, you’re just creating something and you just don’t know really if it’s going to work. Sometimes you can see it on the page, but really, it’s just something that you find, and then when it’s working, you’re like, okay, that’s it. We know that’s it. But especially for a new show, it’s really something that it’s like sometimes you don’t really find it until you’re in the editing room. So we had a few moments early on where we knew when we figured out the pig’s head, which was something that Dipika Guha, one of the writers, that was her idea to make this pig’s head a character. And we ran with that once we knew that that was something that could give us a little bit of structure and also a way that we can come back a few times in a few different ways. And that was something that felt, tonally, of a piece with what we wanted to do.
But then we were writing it and we’re like, “Okay, well, it’d be great if it was Patrick Stewart.” But I think there were 50 people we were pitching on that could be that voice, and then we just ultimately made our wishlist and he was at the top of it, and I just can’t believe he said yes.
Ayla Ruby: I think I read or saw something where he said he couldn’t stop thinking about the scripts once he read them, and that was part of his yes for this.
Ben Karlin: Yeah. We wrote the character in a interesting enough way where it actually had a journey, and then obviously had a fun death scene, and actors love doing death scenes.
Ayla Ruby: It’s a very special death scene.
Ben Karlin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we knew that for some actors, they would read it and I’d be like, “This is fun. I get to do some comedy. I get to do the… There’s a little bit of meat on the bone in terms of what’s actually happening. And then I get this really fun comedic death.” So we knew that there was something that was going to be appealing. And then some of it is just logistics. He was doing the Avengers movie.
And he happened to have a little window and yeah, it was incredible. And we got to do it in person with him. He came in, we had two days in the studio with him. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life.
Ayla Ruby: That sounds amazing. Wow, that’s cool. So also, the pig’s head, does anyone have the pig’s head now? Is that a souvenir of the?
Ben Karlin: There were a couple props from the show. There was this giant deformed Buddha head that we said that we’d use for the-
Ayla Ruby: In the museum.
Ben Karlin: Yeah. And the storage on these things is really tricky, and I think we had to let go of everything. Someone has the pig’s head. I don’t know who. The pig’s head is a little more portable than the giant 20-foot Buddha head.
Ayla Ruby: That’s fair. Cool. So we’ve talked a little bit about family and all the complications, and it’s really important in the show. And I want to ask about two characters in the family. I want to ask about Q, because first, the Bond connection, and also how did she come about?
Ben Karlin: Well, we knew we wanted to have a voice of … There’s this… people my age and Riz’s age, I’m 10 years older than him or so, but we’re from a similar generation where how we look at these things, and there’s a real marked difference between our worldview and someone of Q’s age. And we really felt it was important to have someone that had a different attitude towards this thing that Riz’s character was going through. So we really wanted to give voice to this more someone who didn’t necessarily feel the weight of this like, “Oh, I’m trying to represent this family and I’m trying to uplift us.” And someone who just maybe was like, “What? Why? Stop trying so hard.” We felt that that was real and needed to have that perspective represented in the show.
Again, in the world of we wanted this show to be this fun house mirror deconstructivist Bond exercise, so we wanted to take these iconic character names and repurpose them, and that’s how we came up with calling that character Q. Obviously, in the Bond movies, Q is the fix it person who has all the gadgets, and we just thought it’d be really interested if the Q in our show was this disaffected 20 something who just didn’t have all the weight that Riz’s character or Guz’s character were carrying around, but was still a complete person with her own hopes and dreams and trying to figure out how to make it work. And so that really was super exciting for us.
We wanted to do a lot more with her. We found that the episodes played fast and we didn’t want to make them fatter. And one of the things that was disappointing for me is we had actually more interesting and a more layered and nuanced version of Q’s story that we were just hoping to do next season, if there’s another season.
Ayla Ruby: Knock on wood, I hope so. So you mentioned Guz’s character, and I’d love to talk about him because he was brilliant and fantastic. And can you talk about, I know there’s this friendship between him and Riz, how did the character come to be and did the actor influence the character?
Ben Karlin: Yeah, well, it was written for him. So yes, again, before we had any scripts, before we had a shape to the show, we knew that there was this character, this brother-cousin character who was going to represent the keeping it real version. Whereas, Riz’s character was this white pleasing, white facing, assimilationist character. We knew that we wanted this brother character to be the exact opposite and owning everything about him that was shameful to Riz’s character. That dynamic was baked in from the beginning. And then when we first started talking about types, Riz was just like, “I want Guz Kahn to play this role. He’s perfect for it.” I was familiar with his work. I was a fan of his work and I was like, 100%. So from the beginning, every single line we wrote was for Guz. So that made writing that character not easy, but we just knew exactly what it was.
Ayla Ruby: I love that. I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but I want to ask about the last episode because you wrote that episode.
Ben Karlin: I did, yes.
Ayla Ruby: And I also want to ask about the very last line in that episode because that’s so impactful and so important.
Ben Karlin: Yes.
Ayla Ruby: He gets the chance to say, “The name’s Bond, James Bond,” but he says something else.
Ben Karlin: Yes.
Ayla Ruby: Can you talk about that and how that came to be and what it means?
Ben Karlin: Yeah. Well, we realized, again, really early on that the show needed to be about this character who was just seeking external validation, but at some point needs to realize, “Oh, shit, I need to love myself.” That’s a very relatable journey for a lot of people. You don’t have to be an actor to have that epiphany. It’s like, “Oh, if I’m going to be happy, if I’m going to be loved, it starts with loving myself.” You can’t do anything if you don’t love yourself. And obviously, Patrick Stewart made this very clear, he had a lot of hate for himself and a lot of anger toward himself. And so we knew that doing a little switcheroo of everything that I want is represented by me getting this role of this iconic British super spy, we needed to flip that on its head and have the win being actually, I need to own my own name and whatever happens next after that doesn’t matter because that’s the growth and that’s the journey.
So we knew early on that we wanted to get there, and obviously, how you get there is a big part of the work that we were doing for months and months and months, but we knew that we wanted to end with him saying, “Actually, on some level, getting this doesn’t matter and shouldn’t matter. I need to accept who I am and then I’ll be okay no matter what.” And we felt that was going to be emotionally satisfying if we can earn that moment at the end.
Ayla Ruby: It was fantastic. And I feel just as a viewer, I feel like you guys earned that moment and it was just wonderful. So again, kudos.
Ben Karlin: Thank you. Thank you.
Ayla Ruby: I know we’re getting pretty close on time, but I wanted to know, you mentioned, potentially, another season. Is there anything you’re working on now or anything we haven’t talked about that you want to share or that you can talk about?
Ben Karlin: Well, we felt that the shows that you love, yes, the story obviously is important, but it really is about the characters. So we felt that there was a lot we wanted to do with these people. We hint at the end of the first season of the family history a little bit, and what happened to Q and-
Ayla Ruby: And his sister, who is very curious, too.
Ben Karlin: Yeah, exactly. So we didn’t want to be too explicit about that stuff. We just wanted to breadcrumb enough, and we felt like there’d be a very interesting further exploration of all of these characters reconciling and embracing a little bit of their past and how that’s informing who they are and how they move forward. So that is where we bread crumbed some stuff in the finale with a hope towards the second season while, at the same time, wanting it to feel like a complete journey in the first season.
Ayla Ruby: I think you achieved that. Thank you very much for chatting. This is wonderful.
Ben Karlin: It was a pleasure.
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