Nabhaan Rizwan's gift is stillness in a room where other actors would reach for more. In Station Eleven he made a shut-in winter the part of the series we still think about; whether the louder parts he has since taken suit him as well is an open question.
Fi1m perspective
Three people in a high-rise flat above a frozen city, and the man who lives there is the quietest of them. Frank Chaudhary in Station Eleven (2021) is the least showy part in a large cast, and Nabhaan Rizwan plays him accordingly: he listens, he waits, he lets his brother and the child do the talking. The windows in the towers opposite go dark one by one and he watches them go. Those episodes moved us more than anything else in the series, and it was Rizwan doing the least that did it, in rooms Ruth Ammon had filled with the clutter of a life stopped mid-sentence, with Dan Romer's piano arriving late and quietly. We will not say how that winter ends.
It was not the beginning. Rizwan came through youth theatre and youth work after his A-levels, and his first professional audition got him the lead in Informer (2018), which is where people first noticed him. Then came 1917 (2019), where he plays Sepoy Jondalar in a part small enough that our own review did not single him out; the camera in that film had other things on its mind. Mogul Mowgli (2020) let him rap on screen, which he does under the name El Huxley when he is not acting. Industry (2020) and Station Eleven followed, then In Camera (2023), a lead for Naqqash Khalid in a satire of the British film business, and Kaos (2024), in which he plays Dionysus.
The roles cluster. Again and again he is cast as a young British-Asian man being looked at, and asked to show us what that looking does to him. He does it well, and the danger is obvious: an industry that likes what an actor does once will ask for it until he stops. He has said as much himself, in different words: "I wanted to let go of the idea of being 'good', and to just take risks." In Camera and Kaos are the risks, and since we have not reviewed them we will not judge them here, except to note that they are heightened, strange material and a long way from Frank's flat. Two of his projects are with his brother Mawaan Rizwan, and Juice he also writes.
On our evidence, the director who got the best out of him is Patrick Somerville, who gave him a room and time and trusted that a man saying nothing at a kitchen table could hold an hour. Start there. If the parts ahead give him that kind of patience he will reward it; if they keep asking him to be loud, we are less sure, and we would rather not find out.
Biography
Nabhaan Rizwan is a British actor. He was born on 7 February 1997 in Essex, England.
Rizwan made his screen debut in the 2018 BBC drama series Informer as Raza Shar. He played Sepoy Jondalar in the 2019 film 1917 and has appeared in series including Station Eleven (2021), Industry (2020) and KAOS (2024) as Dionysus, and films such as Mogul Mowgli (2020) and The Last Letter from Your Lover (2021). He is the brother of actor and comedian Mawaan Rizwan.
