Call this one The Sound of Riz Ahmed’s Wife’s Name. When the Sound of Metal star let slip that he recently got married on Louis Theroux’s Grounded podcast, he wouldn’t share his wife’s name, but he changed his mind when talking to Jimmy Fallon on January 13’s The Tonight Show. The lucky lady? Fatima Farheen Mirza, “an amazing novelist” whose acclaimed 2018 debut, A Place for Us, was a New York Times best seller and 2019 One Book, One New York finalist. Ahmed met Mirza in a New York café, when he was working on his Sound of Metal role. “We were both like jostling over the same laptop plug point,” he said. “It’s like a very modern way of meeting.”
One thing led to another, and the two eventually got married in a “super intimate” backyard ceremony. Ahmed told Fallon he didn’t mean for it to be a “secret” wedding, as it’s being characterized. “I never know how much is oversharing,” he explained. “Like, I’m into matcha lattes, but that’s just never come up. I’m not a secret matcha-latte drinker.” Not anymore, at least! The best part of his small pandemic wedding, though? “You didn’t have 500 aunties hanging around you, pinching your cheeks,” Ahmed said. “No disrespect to the aunties, but Asian weddings are big, and you always got these people crawling out of the woodworks, who I think are kind of probably impostors. They just smell the kebabs on the street and just wander in, like, ‘Yeah, I knew you when you were a kid!’”
