In AppleTV+’s newest series Extrapolations, the year is 2059. Climate change is making the planet unliveable; humanity hides inside during the daylight hours to avoid dying from heatstroke. In the middle of this, two men set out on a mission to deliver the precious rice seeds they’ve stolen across the country.
It’s a high-action, big-budget TV thriller about the climate crisis: with episodes set in different time periods over the 21st century. It features an all-star cast, including Kit Harington, Meryl Streep, Ed Norton, Marion Cotillard and Sienna Miller. In other words, it’s not the kind of show you’d expect to land for your first acting gig. However, that’s exactly what Gaz Choudhry has done.
It’s a far cry from his day job, but that doesn’t seem to faze him. Choudhry, 37, is one of the UK’s best wheelchair basketball players (something for which he awarded an MBE last year), but for a period of 2021, he found himself balancing playing and coaching the British team with filming – and rather than being overwhelmed by the enormity of the show, he describes himself as the “luckiest person ever”.
“I pretty much got the role just before the Tokyo Paralympics [which ran from August to September 2021],” he says. “So I was trying to learn the script, play and coach the team all at the same time. It was all kind of compressed into this crazy couple of weeks.”
Did he find it a bit much? Not at all. “I very much used it to kind of refill my cup mentally. So that was really cool, because I was kind of engaging with this script, and hadn’t done anything like this before. So I was kind of just discovering things about the process as I went along, which was really nice.”
It’s been a remarkable journey from basketball to the big screen. Born in Pakistan in 1985, Choudhry moved to London at a young age with his family, settling in Southall before moving to Ealing.
“I didn’t have the typical kind of immigrant experience,” he says. “I went to a super working-class, white school where all the kind of brown and black kids kind of found each other and were friends. I didn’t feel that lack of integration, really, to be honest…. I never felt like an outsider being in west London.”
Aged 10, Choudhry lost his leg to bone cancer, and at 13, he discovered wheelchair basketball. “I was blown away. I just fell in love,” he says. “I went to a local club, and I saw people of all different ethnicities and different disabilities and races... I realised that that was such a unique experience so much later on, that’s not actually how the sport’s practiced.”
Choudhry went onto represent Britain in tournament after tournament. He made his debut at London 2012, before winning bronze at both the Rio and Tokyo Paralympics. He was also part of the team that won two golds at European Championships.
However, when he saw an open casting call for an unnamed TV series, he went for it. “It was certainly not a conscious path I wanted to explore,” he says. “But there must be a part of me right, subconsciously, that was really interested in this.”
Since appearing in Extrapolations, he’s become obsessed. “I’ve been doing acting school, I’ve completely immersed myself in that. To be fair, it’s – I’ve always discovered the passion after the fact,” he says.
“I didn’t know I wanted to play with a basketball as a kid, I never had dreams of that. And then I went and fell in love with it straightaway. And [this is] very similar to that, it just happens to be I didn’t go to a drama school.”
In the series, Choudhry plays Neel, an amputee war veteran who’s assigned to be a bodyguard for the truck’s driver, Gaurav (Adarsh Gourav). The pair of them are required to carry the entire episode, which they do – though Choudhry is ambivalent about whether his hire represents a rise in the representation of disability across the TV industry.
“I think it’s certainly getting better that you’re getting stories told about people, which are more interesting and more diverse in general,” he says.
“You’re certainly having more interesting stories, and not just in the disability space, but, you know, people of colour and women and LGBTQ all kinds of narratives. You know, for me, the biggest thing… maybe [I’m being] quite naive and quite passionate about it, but the whole acting and the whole creative process is just an exploration of humanity, right.”
The show’s apocalyptic theme isn’t lost on him either. The India of 2059 is almost unliveable, with freak heatwaves capable of causing strokes, no rice to speak of and a vaguely-mentioned war between India and Pakistan.
“I’m not a climate scientist, but just from the various pressures that, you know, climate change is putting already on, on migration, on water resource scarcity... 300 million people are likely to be affected, or could be affected because of the current trajectory of climate change that we’re on,” he says. “And we can’t even fathom that number: that number is so huge. Each person is a real human being who have lives and kids and families. And when you think of that scale, it’s a little bit overwhelming sometimes.”
With immigration constantly in the headlines, I ask him about the current climate for immigrants in the UK. His response: as a Londoner, it’s difficult to speak for the rest of the country. “But I mean, for me, it’s scary when I when I hear the things that are being said, and the dehumanising things for refugees. I mean, it’s scary.”
With Extrapolations under his belt, Choudhry wants to continue exploring the world of acting – and has even started writing his own material. “I don’t think I was very creative or had this kind of desire to be creative till this experience,” he says.
“I’ve really enjoyed that feeling of the ambiguity of, you kind of put it out there and… there isn’t an absolute right way of having done it.”
