The BAFTA-winning creative par excellence went from Youtube skits to clown school, to helming one of the most headturning British comedies of the decade.

Mawaan Rizwan’s time at clown school wasn’t quite what he expected. He parted with thousands of pounds, aged 23, to study a summer course at the storied École Philippe Gaulier, near Paris. However, by the time his timetable was in motion, “I thought, ‘This is a first-class scam,’” he recalls. 

The teaching style was ostensibly the problem. “[The tutor] would make you go in front of the whole class and try to be funny on the spot. Then he’d bang his drum and one by one go around the classroom getting feedback on why you were so shit.’” Any remaining crumb of dignity would then be squashed once-and-for-all. “He would make you confess to someone in the room that you fancied them, and then you’d have to perform just for them.” The fellow students would be forthcoming with critique. “I was just getting insulted every day and being told to sit back down.”  

It wasn’t until months later, when Rizwan was immersed in one of several Augusts spent performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, that the value of that particular educational era registered with him. “I’d be in front of an audience and I’d sense when they were turning on me,” he explains over Zoom – now safe from immediate public scrutiny in the confines of his London home. “The room would go silent, or you could feel a heckle coming. I was one step ahead. So it was the honesty [at École Philippe Gaulier] that was the training.” 

That knack for reading an audience is perhaps why the now-33-year-old is the proud custodian of resplendent surrealist-comedy, Juice. Parlayed from his Fringe efforts, the BBC show saw actor and comedian Rizwan deploy his skills for slapstick and clowning to critical acclaim with its 2023 premiere. It returned for Season 2 in September, weeks before we connect. Rizwan’s emerging from the circus of promo – podcasts, fashion editorials, broadsheet interviews, daytime TV – that bringing a hit comedy back to the screen entails. He’s trying to fight his compulsion to dive back into creating something new, and instead, enjoy the love being directed his way as he parades his wares. “I need to enjoy the showing off,” he smiles.

Juice follows Rizwan’s Jamma – a bowl-cut sporting, childlike figure in a man’s body – as he hopscotches around the ever-growing list of duties demanded of him in adulthood. There’s holding down his marketing job, mediating his parents’ marital issues, and retaining his own relationship with boyfriend Guy (Russell Tovey) – a decisively grown-up therapist whose life is so functional he has £30 handsoap in his bathroom.  

Kaleidoscopic and ever-unpredictable, Juice is like Jamma’s – and Rizwan’s – brain in visual form. Aesthetically, in Season 2, it all hinges on Juice Town – the tangible model town constructed from felt-like materials in saturated colours to depict the exterior shots of the world Jamma inhabits. “We do no special effects,” Rizwan explains. “The sets are all made by hand.” 

Elsewhere, the very human, real-world themes packaged within Jamma’s clowning and comedy are punctuated by casual moments of visual absurdity. Guy and Jamma have been known to travel from bed to a work event via a children’s play tunnel. “If Jamma’s nervous, a book will start levitating,” Rizwan adds. In Season 2, an enigmatic ringmaster named Mr Majal (Mark Gatiss) appears with the offer of swapping Jamma’s soul for someone else’s. “It makes my heart swell with happiness when people say, ‘It’s like we took a tour inside your brain,’” Rizwan beams. Crucially, “It’s such a privilege to have a budget put to your imagination.”

The extension of that budget for a second season came before Juice Season 1 had even met its audience. The show’s commissioner – BBC Head of Comedy Tanya Qureshi, the executive with a hand in some of the broadcaster’s most propulsive comedic storytelling of recent times (Am I Being Unreasonable?, The Outlaws, Dreaming Whilst B\@*k) – came to watch the final two episodes of Season 1 in the editing suite. “We sat there afterwards in silence, and she just smiled at us and had a little tear in her eye,” Rizwan says. “That afternoon, she went home, and we got an email saying we had a Series 2.” Subsequently, “We didn’t feel like we were desperate to prove our worth,” he says. “I could just write the Series 2 that I wanted to write and follow my bliss in terms of where I wanted to see these characters go.” That industry validation was further consolidated the following year when Rizwan scored a BAFTA TV Award for Male Performance in a Comedy. 

“I think people really resonate with the queer joy in the show,” he reflects on the many facets of its appeal. “In times like these, I think people need that.” Other emotional textures – spanning love, identity and family dynamics – figure as richly in the show’s tapestry as its zany mise en scene. Season 2 features a shadow puppet retelling of Jamma’s dad’s immigration story (based on Rizwan’s father’s own experience of moving to the UK from Pakistan). “That conversation I had with my father,  something that was quite specific to me, now someone will come up to me and be like, ‘That’s exactly how I am with my father.’ You can hear in the tone of their voice whether they found [the scene] either healing, reassuring or funny.” 

Rizwan’s father doesn’t feature in Juice, however, his mother, Shahnaz – herself an actor in multiple black and white Pakistani films prior to the family’s 1994 arrival in the UK – takes on the role of Jamma’s mum, Farida. Riffing on real-life events, Farida is a former movie star and now the exuberant manager of a community centre, self-termed the Megacentre. Mawaan’s brother, actor Nabhaan Rizwan (Industry, Kaos), also finds his way onto the call sheet, playing Jamma’s edgy younger brother Isaac. Any assertions that, as its helmsman, Mawaan is Juice’s and his family’s breakout star could be challenged by his account of the popularity of Shahnaz out in the wild. Mawaan and his brother were once asked if they could capture a picture of her with a fan at a petrol station. “I think that was the day we realised we have to make peace with the real star in the Rizwan household.” 

Shahnaz loves the attention, according to Mawaan. And for the most part, sharing professional quarters with family has proven plain-sailing. “The only time I was like, ‘I’ve had it with my mum, was at the Juice wrap party,” Rizwan smiles. When Mawaan was a child in Ilford, Shahnaz would stage events in the local church hall and dress Mawaan in drag, before enlisting him to perform for guests. “I used to do this song, this Asian song and at the Juice wrap party, mum put on the song.” The decision came without warning. “Then she started dancing and everyone cleared a circle in the middle, and they were like, ‘Come on…’. And I had to do this dance. I was like, ‘Mum, just let me not perform for five minutes. You literally don’t need to do that. I’ve got a six-part series. We made it.’”

“You know at any point when she is on set. She is loud, proud, and not there to play games.” Her only foe during a day spent filming is catering. “She calls catering food, ‘dead food,’” Mawaan explains. She believes it’s riddled with preservatives and attends set each day armed with Tupperware from home instead. “She’ll not only bring her own food, but she’ll also then enforce that me and Nabhaan don’t eat catering as well, because her food is ‘better for us,’” he laughs. “So she brings us food that we didn’t ask for.” 

It’s a level of nourishment that’s missed in Juice’s writing phase, however. “That process is really messy,” Mawaan admits. Stitching together the intricate world of the show and lives of its characters is an all-or-nothing affair, the kind of immersion that sees his normal life muted while he dives in. There are late nights, copious amounts of caffeine, and “a million post-it notes that within 24 hours stop making sense because you’ve put too many post-it notes on the wall.” Eating, evening socials plans, answering phone calls and replying to messages are among the casualties. “Writing’s like a tap,” he continues. “When it’s not on, it’s hard to force it. So if the tap turns on, I have to put everything aside. There’s a level of Frankenstein in his lab.” 

And he’ll never know what kind of beast is coming out the other side. For example, Season 2 saw Juice lean into rom-com territory, with the on-off love story of Jamma and Guy underpinning events. Did Rizwan go in with the intention of contributing to the recent renaissance of the genre? “Hell no. I wanted to do anything but a rom-com. But I was writing it, and the characters kept telling me what they wanted. And it was each other. On paper, there are too many differences between them, but what happens when you do love each other and you work through those differences?”  

Anchored in that narrative is the perennial tussle between how much one should change themself for a partner, something a younger Mawaan, less sure of his place in the world, would have identified with. “The worst advice I would hate hearing was, ‘Just be yourself,’ because I grew up as a bit of a shapeshifter and code switcher. Depending on the friends I was with, another part of me was exercised. I think a relationship can be a further extension of that.” 

While Juice’s Season 2 finale seemingly marks the show’s conclusion, the opportunity to take the story on a second outing has given Rizwan the chance to exhibit yet more sides of his visionary mind – and of Jamma, on his road to becoming at one with himself, or at least with his inconsistencies. “There are times, this season, where he’s three-dimensional. He’s clowny, sexy, emotional.” That bowl-cut does come under fire, though – in part, a nod to the wrath it received from comments online following the release of Season 1. “I’ve slowly learned that actually this bowl cut is not the sexiest of all haircuts,” Rizwan ponders. “My friends have asked, ‘Have you been laid since this show came out?’”