For his role in The Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed immersed himself fully in all aspects of his character's life: he'd go to AA and NA meetings, punk shows, and attend weddings and Deaf Poetry slam sessions with his American Sign Language coach. Eventually, he became fluent in the language—but it didn't start out that way. "I couldn't really express myself as well as I wanted to early on," he explains in this episode of Screen Tests with Lynn Hirschberg. "I'd get frustrated and I didn't know the sign for thinking—for when you're saying um. At that point, all I knew to express how I was feeling was f**k up. After the hundredth time I said 'I'm fucking up,' they said 'That's your sign name.' It gives you an idea of the inventiveness, the elegance, the creativity of American Sign Language and deaf culture, to be able to encapsulate all of that in a gesture loaded with so much meaning."
