Photo: Dfree / Shutterstock
The story of how they met is SO cute.
By Olivia Jakiel — Written on Jan 14, 2021
Well, no one saw this one coming!
The Night Of actor Riz Ahmed, who nabbed an Emmy for his performance in the 2016 HBO mini-series, revealed he secretly got married while appearing on the Jan. 11 episode of Louis Theroux’s Grounded podcast.
Ahmed accidentally revealed the big news after he mentioned that he stayed in the Bay Area after filming a movie in late 2020 because his “wife’s family” is there.
At the time, he did not disclose the identity of his blushing bride, instead choosing to keep that aspect of his relationship private.
The 38-year-old award-winning actor also revealed that he hasn’t been married for “very long,” and doesn’t talk about his relationship for a good reason: “I mean, I guess I don’t really feel it’s generally that relevant, so I don’t delve into my personal life or my dating history or even family life much.”
However, on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Ahmed revealed that he and famed author Fatima Farheen Mirza is the mystery woman he married.
Who is Riz Ahmed’s wife, Fatima Farheen Mirza?
Read on for everything you need to know about Fatima Farheen Mirza, including the cute story of how she and Ahmed met.
Fatima Farheen Mirza is a writer.
She’s a New York Times best-selling author, and is best known for her novel, A Place For Us.
She’s also published two essays: "Boxing," which was published in Granta magazine in June 2019, and "Skittles," which was published in The Good Immigrant in Feb. 2019.
She’s an activist.
One scroll through her Instagram page will show you that Mirza is a dedicated activist, and often posts about important causes.
In May 2020, she posted a poignant caption on her Instagram page about the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the protests sparked by George Floyd’s senseless murder by Minneapolis Police:
“Enraged and heartbroken and at a complete loss of words. Please continue to donate to bail funds to help protesters who have been arrested.
Please do the work of educating yourself and your loved ones on anti-Blackness and the many and subtler forms of white supremacy— not just when it manifests as murder.
We have to ask ourselves what more can we learn, and do, and interrogate how we are also complicit in an unjust system. Black lives matter. Please continue to donate.”
She has an artsy eye.
Mirza definitely has an eye for the camera! The writer, who was born in 1991, also posts a ton of artsy photos on her Instagram account in addition to her posts about activism.
Mirza and Ahmed met by chance at a cafe in New York when they both went there to do some writing.
Is someone writing the screenplay for this rom-com?
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Ahmed revealed that he met his gorgeous wife at a cafe in New York while preparing for his film, The Sound of Metal.
“We just both sat down at the same table in a cafe where we both turned up to write,” he recalled. “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.”
“Obviously, I met Fatima for the first time and met so many people in the deaf community that have become friends,” he added. “And there’s just something about this whole period around this film that was kind of life-changing.”
Their wedding was intimate.
Ahmed shared some details about his and Mirza’s wedding day, saying that they kept the celebration of their big day relatively small in wake of the ongoing coronavirus 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 joked.
Congrats to the newlyweds!
Olivia Jakiel is an editor and writer who covers celebrity and entertainment news. Follow her on Instagram and keep up with her zingers on Twitter.