Mawaan Rizwan is done with reality

It took a whole decade for the TV industry to catch on to Mawaan Rizwan’s ambition. His hilarious, surreal sitcom Juice, which has just released its second season on the BBC, existed in multiple forms before it was finally commissioned for TV, including as a highly aspiring Edinburgh Fringe show in 2018.

“I wanted to make a TV show where there were surreal set-pieces where the physical world around this character would start walking and changing depending on his emotions,” the Pakistan-born, east London-raised actor says, sitting outside at London’s Somerset House on one of the last days of a long summer. “Everyone told me, ‘No, that’s too expensive. That’s too impractical. You can’t do that on a British comedy budget. Write something simpler.’” 

With his pride dented but his dreams still firmly intact, he made a career first as a YouTuber, then a stand-up comic, a Taskmaster favourite, a writer for shows including Netflix smash Sex Education, a budding musician and beyond. “I’d write and pitch other stuff,” he says, but Juice “really was my baby, and the kind of show I would like to watch. That’s the kind of stuff that stands the test of time.”

In his career as a writer, Rizwan felt cornered into writing one-dimensional stories based on his own background as a queer first-generation immigrant. “There was stuff that I wanted to write, but wasn’t being given permission,” he says. “For many years, I was told, as a Brown writer, as a queer writer, you must write those stories. Those stories are often really on the nose, though. When you’re given a brief to write about a character from a marginalised background, often that character is not interesting because they have to be a goody two-shoes, or they have to compensate for a society where there’s an imbalance regarding that marginalised person. The piece of TV ends up becoming this vehicle to right the wrongs of society, when an actually interesting story is of a character with flaws.”

When Juice finally did come to life in 2023, Rizwan’s character, Jamma, delightfully skewered this trend of overly sanitised and polished stories. The show’s lead is hilariously and relentlessly screwing up, either in his love life, work life or as a brother and son (to his real-life family members, brother Nabhaan, an actor in Industry and more, and mother Shahnaz, a child star in Pakistan).

Crucially, Jamma’s identity feels incidental to the story, rather than its crux and reason for being. “Which is most of our lives,” Rizwan concurs. “We don’t wear our identities every day walking down the street. All his contradictions are important to me. There’s a scene where he’s talking in Urdu to his parents, and then fucking his boyfriend in the same restaurant. That’s very politically important to me,” he giggles.

Though possessing a fundamentally good heart, Jamma’s storylines often revolve around his general cluelessness, a wish to find some solid ground (“It smells like stability!” he says earnestly when sniffing the walls at his older ex-boyfriend Guy’s (Russell Tovey) house in season two) and a yearning to be understood.

As well as through the use of its meticulous and impressive set-pieces, his character is fleshed out through full-body movement from Rizwan that feels akin to a cartoon character. “I love a lot of the Robin Williams stuff, and obviously I love Buster Keaton,” Rizwan says of his passion for expressive acting.

“When we were writing, I’d always get up and physicalise stuff. Beyond words, your body can tell the story as well. I wanted to play a character like this for years, where I got to use my whole body, and those characters weren’t really being written. We come from such a tradition of physical comedy in this country, but it’s all forgotten.”

The rapturously received first season of Juice landed Rizwan a BAFTA for Male Performance in a Comedy last year. He also landed on the 2024 BAFTA Breakthrough Cohort, tracing the footsteps of Bella Ramsey, Josh O’Connor and others.

For the show’s second season, which dials up the comedy and the set-pieces while keeping the show’s energy and heart, following what entertained him and his cast was paramount for Rizwan. It leads to set-ups that feel of a different world from most British sitcoms, with a desire to break beyond the genre boundary.

“Whenever I’m told we can’t do something because it’s never been done before, I just don’t find that a good enough excuse,” he says. “I just won’t take no for an answer. I think people are scared that something might cost a lot of money, and that it’s just frills. If you strip it all back, the story needs to stand and the gags need to land, but sometimes the surreal stuff can save money. Sometimes it can help tell a more efficient story when, as a character tells another character how he feels, a table will start wobbling. That’s so much more interesting, and a visual way of showing his feelings. Something’s levitating because of this guy’s anxiety – that’s one less rubbish expositional line that I don’t have to write!”

As well as being skilful and logistically impressive, the vibe of the show also came from a desire to make himself and others laugh. “It’s a joy-filled show, and so the making of it is very much joy-led,” he says simply. “What brings us joy? Let’s do that. What drains us? Let’s not do that. A lot of the plot stuff would drain me: ‘Oh, this character should do this by this episode, so he learns this’… boring! Let’s just follow our joy, and then the characters go on a natural journey anyway.”

The show’s new season, with its extravagant props and colour-filled sets, is a delightfully joyous and childlike watch, mirroring its creation. “Everyone was working with Play-Doh and figuring out how to do anti-gravitational prop work,” Rizwan says with wide eyes of life on-set. “It was amazing! On the best of days, you’d turn up to work, look around and everyone is bouncing up and down on this giant fur playground. People were so happy to just be at work. Me and Eros [V, director] would look at each other and feel a bit of pride. We facilitated these adults being absolute babies!”

While Juice is Rizwan’s self-confessed baby and the pinnacle of his career so far, he’s intent on showing his working and the 15 years of jumping between disciplines to find something that worked both for himself and externally.

He previously told The Guardian that he keeps his oldest and most rough around the edges YouTube videos online because “I want people to see how shit I was.” Today, he adds: “I did the Edinburgh Fringe for eight years in a row. I’ll be better than some people, and I’ll be worse than some people. The idea is not to compare yourself to anyone, good or bad. It’s that you clock your 10,000 hours and you put in the time and you keep doing it. I just want people to know it’s not an overnight thing – I’ve been hustling since I was 17.”

Alongside his emergence as a special writer and actor for the small screen, Rizwan also makes music and performs live as Mawaan and the Tracksuits. “I’ve made music since I was 16, and it’s always been a very private thing that I’ve just done for myself,” he says. “I’ve made albums and mixtapes, but no one’s ever heard them.”

After music slowly made its way into his stand-up sets, his set at Glastonbury 2024 saw him debut his non-comedic songs on stage for the first time. “I’ve got a rock song, I’ve got a grungy song, a dirty bass hip-hop song about nepo babies,” he laughs. Some of the music in the vault is “quite angry with some rock-star energy”, he says, adding: “In music, you can transcend some of your limitations that you’re put under in comedy.”

Like everything Rizwan has turned his hand to across his 15 years in entertainment, the aim is for transcendence and joy. Despite finding both the commissioner and the audience for his dream TV show, Rizwan wants his next acting projects to be “nothing like” Juice. Among the show’s sitcom tropes are a clear love for the fantastical, and he sees his ideal next roles being in the fantasy and supernatural realm.

“I love Dracula, I love Frankenstein, Dorian Gray,” he says. “I love world-building, as you can see in season two. It’s there for a reason. It’s me making a statement of, ‘I want to work in those worlds.’ I’m done with reality!”