Riz Ahmed has unveiled his new bride.
The actor, who revealed this week that he secretly got married, confirmed on Wednesday’s episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” that he wed novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza.
Ahmed, 38, clarified that he wasn’t trying to keep his marriage a secret.
“It’s a weird one, isn’t it? I guess because we live in a social media age if you don’t, like, get on the megaphone about stuff it’s like, it’s a secret — but I never know how much is oversharing,” he told Fallon. “Like, I’m into matcha lattes, but that’s just never come up. I’m not a secret matcha latte drinker.”
The pair initially met “so randomly” in a New York cafe while he was prepping for his film “Sound of Metal,” where he plays a heavy metal drummer who starts to lose his hearing.
“We just both sat down at the same table in a cafe where we both turned up to write,” he said. “We were both jostling over the same laptop plug point, like a very modern way of meeting, and we struck up a friendship and then reconnected down the line.”
He said meeting Mirza at that time made the movie that much more special for him.
“Obviously, I met Fatima for the first time and met so many people in the deaf community that have become friends. And there’s just something about this whole period around this film that was kind of life-changing,” he said.
As for what their secret wedding looked like, Ahmed said they kept things small because of the pandemic.
“Obviously, kept it super intimate, and socially distanced. There was just like, hardly anyone there really,” he said. “We did it in a backyard, which is nice in lots of ways. And I think the nicest thing about it was you didn’t have 500 aunties hanging around you, pinching your cheeks. No disrespect to the aunties.”
He continued jokingly, “Asian weddings are big. You always got these people crawling out the woodworks, who I think are kind of probably imposters. They just smell the kebabs on the street and just wander in.”
Ahmed initially broke the news of his wedding on the Jan. 11 episode of Louis Theroux’s “Grounded” podcast, saying, “It’s the first time I’ve ever mentioned it in an interview. So, congratulations on this incredibly exciting scoop.”
Mirza is known for her novel “A Place for Us.”
