Mawaan Rizwan on making the year’s best new British sitcom ‘Juice’

Mawaan Rizwan bounds into a cool but low-key Haggerston café wearing an eye-catching yellow sweater. His infectious energy also makes him hard to miss. The actor, comedian and longtime M.I.A. stan (more on this later) is super-friendly and generous with his time even though we’re meeting on his 31st birthday. He’s rightly proud of his dazzling new sitcom, Juice, so the celebrations can wait for an hour.

Rizwan is also really good fun – when a waitress asks if we ordered the sandwich she’s carrying, which sadly we did not, he replies playfully: “Only if you’re giving it for free.” He is sharp, open and doesn’t use humour to deflect potentially revealing questions – a trick used by some comedians in interviews.

“My mum always said to me: ‘You walk in a room and make an impression. I’ve made too many sacrifices for you not to be noticed,'” he says. That was pretty good advice, right? It worked today. “Well,” he replies with a smile, “my therapist would say it’s nice sometimes just to walk in a room, order a cup of tea and sit down.”

Ordering a quiet cuppa is about to get tougher for Rizwan because his BBC Three sitcom Juice, which he wrote, created and stars in, is absolutely brilliant and certain to boost his profile. You probably know him already from zingy guest spots on Taskmaster, Live At The Apollo and Friday Night Live, and also from acting roles in Simon Amstell’s indie romcom Benjamin and veganism mockumentary Carnage.

But Juice, which Rizwan developed from his 2018 Edinburgh Fringe show of the same name, is a glorious star vehicle which showcases his flair for infusing relatable scenarios with surreal clowning: in episode two, his character Jamma tries to impress a group of potential new flatmates by pulling down his trousers and making his butt-cheeks dance. Despite his best efforts, he doesn’t get the room.

The show is also a family affair that co-stars Rizwan’s real-life mother and brother, Shahnaz Rizwan and Industry actor Nabhaan Rizwan, as Jamma’s domineering on-screen mum and upstaging younger sibling. When asked the extent to which the plots are autobiographical, Rizwan replies: “All my writing draws on personal experience, but I would say it’s fiction. Even if I tried to make it autobiographical, once the actors got in there – including my mum and brother – they made it their own thing. If I’d been like, ‘Well, that isn’t how it happened in 1990-whatever, that would have been a shame.”

“I want to smash the box that people put me in”

Juice also stars Russell Tovey as Jamma’s older and more mature boyfriend, Guy. When Rizwan’s Edinburgh show became a word-of-mouth hit five years ago, he spotted the actor’s face in the crowd. “I was like, ‘What’s the guy from [cult sitcom] Him & Her doing in my audience? I think he’s here by mistake,'” Rizwan recalls. “But then he came backstage and said he loved the show. Cut to five years later and he’s part of the team.”

Jamma’s job at a funky London marketing agency is going well despite his inability to charm his frosty boss. However, his defining relationships are with his mum – a frustrated former actress who shares his need for attention – and Guy, “a perfect partner he isn’t quite ready for” because of the age gap. “Jamma lives in this high-end world and has the elasticity of a cartoon character,” Rizwan explains, which leads to some neat physical comedy. “He feels his emotions to the extreme, to the point where the world around him starts changing.”

This is where the show’s distinctive trippy visuals come in. When Guy says “I love you” in a clothes shop fitting room – something Jamma clearly finds overwhelming – we see the walls literally closing in on them. When they bang in a pub toilet cubicle, a burst of confetti fills the screen at Jamma’s moment of climax.

Rizwan says he was determined to make an “very imaginative” show that stands out in a TV landscape he finds increasingly “homogenous”. Ahead of the first pre-production meeting, he sent the creative team a self-made three-minute video with quirky reference points including a “1920s clown act from a German circus”. He also banned his collaborators from trying to steer the show closer to existing sitcom hits. “I was like, ‘This is not Fleabag or Chewing Gum or Gavin And Stacey or ‘insert name of BAFTA-winning comedy’,” he says.

Rizwan has always been driven and very hands-on. As a kid growing up in Ilford, an east London suburb around seven miles from where we are now, he soaked up creative energy from his mother. She had been a child star in Pakistan, where Rizwan was born and raised until the family moved to London when he was two. As a teenager, discovering the thrillingly unpolished, genre-smashing music of M.I.A. proved to be incredibly formative.

“I was blown away by the sounds she was making,” he recalls with widening eyes. When he was 17, he made an album heavily inspired by M.I.A’s scrappy DIY style. “My mum couldn’t afford, like, violin lessons, so I never learned an instrument,” he explains. “But from M.I.A., I learned that music was a digital thing that I could do. I’d be like, ‘Oh, she totally just cut that part [of her 2007 hit ‘Paper Planes’] from an old Clash song. For me, that was the most liberating thing ever.”

“You feel very othered where you’re the only queer or brown person in a room”

Rizwan also took a DIY approach to comedy by making exuberant YouTube videos that you can still watch online. One called “Human Burp Box” from 2010 literally shows him making a rudimentary melody from his own belching. He knew performance was his calling, but had no “easy way in” and did “a lot of random shit” to establish himself. He wrote for several CBeebies shows aimed at preschoolers, put in a stint as a TV warm-up comic, and worked as a special effects runner on Dark Tides, an action movie starring Halle Berry. He says everyone on set was told “not to make eye contact” with the actress, though he doubts this order actually came from Berry herself.

In 2015, Rizwan presented How Gay Is Pakistan?, a well-received BBC documentary exploring LGBTQ+ rights in his birth country, which was informed by his own experience growing up queer in a Muslim family. Recently, he said he doesn’t “talk about the film much” now because journalism was never really his forte, but added that he knows the piece “helped people”.

Like many budding actor-comedians, Rizwan would use money from his various day jobs to fund trips to the Edinburgh Fringe, where he performed every year until Juice became his breakout hit in 2018. “The costs had really mounted up that year, so the stakes were even higher,” Rizwan recalls, lamenting the fact that the expense of putting on an Edinburgh show has made the festival increasingly “elitist”. “But that year I finally had a buzzy show and it was like the stars aligned. People started to go, ‘This kid’s been around long enough that we trust him with some funding.'” The journey to bringing Juice to TV had begun.

Soon afterwards, he was hired to write for Sex Education, an experience he found “empowering” because the show’s creator Laurie Nunn ensured there was no hierarchy and no toxic masculinity among the team. “I’ve done writers’ rooms for panel shows and it’s horrible,” he says. Why? “Well, I think sometimes you feel very othered where you’re the only, for example, queer person or brown person,” he says. “And then you feel pressure to represent the marginalised community you come from. But I never set out to make art from a place of otherness. I was just a kid who liked to express himself in a very unfiltered way.”

Rizwan says he could easily have gone down the kids’ TV route. “I think [producers] think: ‘He’s loud and wearing a colourful outfit – kids will love him,'” he says. “But I like to explore adult themes in a childlike way. I don’t want to detach myself from stuff that is emotionally complex to deal with.” It is this unique fusion – unselfconscious riffs on knotty topics like sibling rivalry, the career ladder and homophobia – that makes Juice so much fun to watch.

Even though the show is about to increase his TV profile, Rizwan hasn’t given up on a music career. He recently rediscovered the unreleased, M.I.A-inspired album he made at 17 and was impressed by his beats, though not his lyrics. “It was all about being a rebel and, like, running red lights,” Rizwan recalls with a cringe. “It was quite politically punky, but without being grounded in any kind of actual politics.”

“I was fully living out my pop star fantasy”

In June, he even got to perform at Glastonbury with his band, Mawaan And The Tracksuits, who are named after his signature sportswear. “I was fully living out my pop star fantasy,” Rizwan says. “I just couldn’t take myself seriously enough to do it, so I have to pepper the songs with jokes. Otherwise I feel like a wannabe.” His latest single, ‘Are You Checking Me Out, Or Are You Just A Racist?’, is a case in point. Its emotive midtempo lope recalls the rap balladry of The Streets, but the witty lyrics are laugh-out-loud funny. “Could you be my big spoon or are you just a bigot in a Wetherspoon?” Rizwan sings on the chorus.

Though his tunes are humorous at the moment, music is no tongue-in-cheek side hustle for Rizwan. “I really respect artists like Donald Glover and Róisín Murphy who are in their own lane and don’t care for the same old [career] trajectory,” he says passionately. “In every job I do, I want to smash the box that people put me in.”

‘Juice’ starts this September on BBC Three and iPlayer

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