Riz Ahmed is finally spilling the beans about his recent wedding, not to mention his wife's identity.
The Rogue One star appeared on The Tonight Show on Wednesday, Jan. 13, where host Jimmy Fallon asked about the news that broke this week surrounding Riz having quietly tied the knot. While giving an interview on Louis Theroux's Grounded podcast, the actor had referred to his wife for the first time but declined to share her name, explaining that he prefers not to "delve into my personal life or my dating history."
During the Tonight Show visit, Jimmy asked Riz to clear up whether he indeed had a "secret wedding." As it turned out, the 38-year-old Venom star claimed he really wasn't trying to hide anything.
"It's a weird one, isn't it?" he replied. "I guess because we live in a social media age, if you don't get on the megaphone about stuff, it's like it's a secret? But I never know how much is oversharing."
He went on to reveal that his wife is novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, and he explained that they first met during a chance encounter in New York City while Riz was prepping for his role in Sound of Metal, which earned him the Gotham Award for Best Actor earlier this week.
"We just both sat down at the same table in a café, where we both turned up to write," he recalled. "We were both jostling over the same laptop plug points, like a very modern way of meeting. And we struck up a friendship, and then we reconnected down the line. But it's weirdly one of the many things about preparing for this role that was so special. It just brought a lot of goodness into my life."
The Emmy winner pointed out that throwing an intimate wedding during an ongoing pandemic can surprisingly have some advantages.
"It was kind of interesting, doing it with COVID and everything going on, obviously kept it super intimate and socially distanced," Riz said. "It was just hardly anyone there, did it in a backyard, which was nice in lots of ways. 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, but Asian weddings are big, and you've always got these people crawling out of the woodwork."
Congrats to Riz and Fatima, and we're sure that plenty of people will be ready to pinch his cheeks as soon as it's medically safe to do so.
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