Riz Ahmed, star of the Academy Award–winning film Sound of Metal, is the guest on the latest episode of percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie's podcast. He talks with Glennie about the film, in which he plays a punk-metal drummer who begins to unravel when he suddenly loses his hearing and identity. Glennie performs on the film's soundtrack, featuring a score by Abraham Marder and Nicolas Becke, which was released on Nonesuch Records in April and can be heard here. You can hear their conversation below.

"You have to be prepared to be terrible at playing the drums for five-and-a-half of those seven months and then just about passable for a month and in the week before you shoot something clicking," Ahmed admits of training for the role. "You have to be prepared to be uncomfortable with it. You have to prepared to put yourself in that position of not liking what you're doing, not thinking it's good enough, and sometimes being in states of physical pain when you're working out or kind of emotional pain or embarrassment or frustration, and if you an kind of push through that discomfort then, one step at a time does leave you quite some way down the road."