British spies have tried to recruit Riz Ahmed three times, with a senior BBC figure involved in one of the attempts, the actor has said.

Ahmed made the claim during a recent interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan.“It’s happened three different times and they’re all slightly ridiculous,” he said, “it’s just like inherently comedic.

“One was when I came back from my first film, The Road to Guantánamo, we landed at Luton airport, celebrating,” he added.

“They took me into a side room, put me in an arm lock, threatened to break my arm, took my phone, were pretending to bash the buttons, accidentally changed the language to Danish, and then kind of like, were like: ‘Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?’

“I was like, ‘this is hilarious,’ and then when I finished that, they were like, ‘okay, would you like to keep an eye out for us? ‘Cause it was really great the way you were answering those questions.’ No, thank you.”

Ahmed won an Oscar for his short film The Long Goodbye and is also known for his roles in Four Lions, a dark satire about British jihadists, and The Night Of, which follows a young man’s journey through the US criminal justice system.

He told Hasan that the second attempt to recruit him involved a family friend. “And the third time was someone senior, high up at the BBC,” he said, without naming the figure but adding that they had “just left” the organisation.

Asked by Hasan how people could be certain he had not accepted any of the offers, Ahmed joked that it would make a “sick biopic if I was actually a fed”.

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