Plastered atop a small cinema complex in the sleepy suburban town of Belfort in eastern France is an poster advertising The Mauritanian—a film depicting the true story of a Guantanamo Bay detainee held without trial or charge for 16 years. The lead actor in the film is hometown-boy-done-good, Tahar Rahim. So good, in fact, that his performance earned him a Golden Globe and BAFTA nomination for Best Actor during this year’s awards season.
Nearly 25 years ago, in the back office of that same cinema, an A4 piece of paper was pinned to the wall, on it was a picture of a young French-Algerian boy with a note underneath it that read
‘Ne laissez pas ce type entrer’—do not let this guy in. The ‘not’ was underlined aggressively, twice. The boy in the picture was a 15-year-old Tahar Rahim.
Rahim was not a bad kid. He was, like most boys from a small town, a bored adolescent thrashing about the suburbs with his friends. Always outdoors and often flanked by his mix-matched crew of rebels, rogues and sworn brothers from all different ethnic backgrounds. They would eat at each other’s houses, play football in the street, steal their older siblings’ CDs and sneak into movie theatres.
When it came to sneaking into the cinema, Rahim was the ring-leader. As the smallest of the group, he found a way to sneak in via the back door without being caught. “I loved watching films in movie theatres,” Rahim recalls, “but we didn’t have a lot of money and there was no way I could afford to go to all the time.” And Rahim went all the time.
Eventually, the boys started growing up and inevitably began chasing after different things—namely girls and going out partying, as teenage boys are want to do—but Rahim kept sneaking into the cinema. For him it had become more than a rebellious act by some cheeky kids looking to come to terms with the challenges of adolescence, something had clicked inside him. He was moved by the storytelling, captivated by the performances, and felt at home in the darkness of the theatre. He’d found his calling.
Cinemas back in the mid-90s had physical ticket stubs that were semi ripped when you went in and then usually immediately discarded by the customers. Rahim would scoop up those used film stubs and pass them off as his own. Despite having aroused the cinema manager’s suspicion, he was never caught out. They knew what he was doing but for years they just couldn’t catch the kid. Until, one day, they did.
It was several years later, Rahim had left home to study sports in nearby Strasburg, but on a visit home one weekend he managed to convince his old friends to sneak into the cinema “for old time’s sake”. The film showing that day was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. “There was about 250 people packed into the screening, and half way through the movie was shut off,” says Rahim.
“Everyone was looking around with no idea what was happening. Then the manager slowly walked over to me and demanded to see my ticket. I didn’t have one. I had money, so I offered to pay, but he refused saying that he wouldn’t accept my money and made me leave. He’d finally won, and it put me to shame in a second. I haven’t done it since!”
Tahar Rahim is in a good mood. Calling from the kitchen of his house in Paris, he has a morning off from shooting and he’s just put his 18-month-old daughter down for her afternoon nap—his four-year-old son is at his cousin’s house for a playdate. He pours himself a coffee and lights up a rolled cigarette, and answers the first question posed to him: “How are things going? At the moment, things are pretty great.”
You can see why. For context, as an actor Rahim is on quite the run this year thanks to two hugely successful releases that have undeniably placed him back on the radar of the most talented leading men working in cinema today. His awards-flirting portrayal of Mohamedou Ould Salahi in The Mauritanian was a showcase in empathy and willingness to explore the extremes of human emotions; while last month’s lead role in Netflix’s hugely popular series The Serpent—playing the real-life murderer and conman Charles Sobhraj, who terrorised Western tourists in the 1970s along Southeast Asia’s hippie trail—was a unrecognisable, unsettling and completely unmissable.
“Each day that I am on set is like a boxing round, but one where I am my own sparring partner. Winning a round feels great, but you know that you have to go again, and again, and again.”
“Both The Mauritanian and The Serpent were successful, and when you get accolades from people that you admire, it gives you self-confidence and it feels good. Like, really good,” he says.
Self-belief can be transformative. If you could bottle the stuff, there isn’t a person in the world who wouldn’t buy it. In fact, it would probably be classified as a performance enhancer and banned from athletic competition. When a professional athlete hits a rich vein of form they are often capable of reaching such elevated levels that it feels like they are in total control of their craft—every shot lands, every decision taken is the right one, it’s as if nothing can touch them.
Now 39 years old, if Tahar Rahim was a boxer, he would be a seasoned fighter coming off two statement making wins in the undercard, with promoters starting to bandy about his name as a world title contender. Rahim appreciates the boxing analogy, but spins it in a different way.
“Each day that I am on set is like a boxing round, but one where I am my own sparring partner,” he says. “Winning a round feels great, but you know that you have to go again, and again, and again.”
This year’s two big successes are not Rahim’s ‘big break’, but more a refresher course in the talent and watchability that the actor possesses.
His first film role came more than a decade ago, when he was surprisingly cast as the lead for Jacques Audiard’s sensational French-language gangster saga, A Prophet. The film won global acclaim, and Rahim won a couple of César Awards (for best actor and most promising actor) catapulting the unknown actor into the public eye in France, and into cinephiles’ consciousness across the world.
His portrayal of an impoverished Muslim prisoner who rises to become a crime lord was a revelation, the announcement of a major talent. Naturally, Hollywood came calling, but after several appearances in English-language films such as the historical epic The Eagle, Rahim retreated back to his native France, overwhelmed by performing in a foreign language and disinterested in the types of parts that Hollywood typically sends to actors of Arab descent. After honing his craft under an array of international directors, Rahim—now fluent in English—made his reintroduction to American audiences in 2018 as an FBI agent hunting Al-Qaeda in the Hulu limited series The Looming Tower, and as Judas opposite Rooney Mara in Mary Magdalene.
“The feedback from my recent work has given me justification that I have been right to be picky with the projects I’ve chosen to work on regardless of what others have advised me. The best thing I’ve ever done is trust my gut.”
“I feel that the feedback from my recent
work has given me justification. Justification that I have been right to be picky with the projects I’ve chosen to work on regardless of what others have advised me. The best thing I’ve ever done is trust my gut.”
Trusting his gut is part of Rahim’s process when it comes to making big decisions—whether it is about choosing a film script, or moving to a new city—and it always has been. According to Rahim, it’s just the way he has been built.
“When you take a risk, you feel alive,” he says revealing which side of the ‘fight or flight’ spectrum that he falls into. “Each time I take a risk, I am scared to fail… and it feels good.”
“I actually remember the exact day when I first fully committed to wanting to be an actor,” Rahim says. He tells a story of how he was living in Strasbourg, doing various jobs to earn some money, when he met a guy who lived in Paris.
He promised Rahim a place to stay as he attempted to try his luck and break into the acting game. Except on the day he was about to step on the train to the capital, the guy called and told him that he could no longer give him a place to stay.
“My brother said if you stay here, you know what the future holds. If you take that train, you don’t know what is going to happen. So I said, ‘f**k it’ and I got on that f**king train!”
“I was with my older brother at the train station, and he looked at me and said ‘Okay, what are you going to do? If you stay here, you know what the future holds. If you take that train, you don’t know what is going to happen. Now you have to make that choice.’ So I said ‘f**k it’ and I got on that f**king train!” he concludes with a laugh. Having arrived in Paris with just €1,000 in his pocket and knowing no one, Rahim’s old street hustle instincts kicked in. Within a week he had been accepted into drama school, he had landed two part-time jobs and found a room in an apartment to rent. “Paris opened its arms to me and told me I was welcome,” says Rahim.
“It was a sign that I’d made the right choice, and that came down to trusting my instincts.”
Whether it is Charles Sobhraj, Mohamedou Ould Salahi or even A Prophet’s Malik El Djebena, Tahar Rahim is known for excelling in darker roles. We ask him whether those particular types of characters are something that he feels that he is particularily drawn to, or do they just seem to find him?
“They tend to find me,” he says. “I would love to do more comedy, but those roles just don’t seem to come to me!” he laughs and adjusts the way he’s sitting before continuing. “The thing is I am always searching for truth in movies. The roles I play and the films that I pick to work on, have to have something meaningful at the core—and you usually find this is a lot more in dramas, and in comedy or action.”
“I would love to do more comedy, but those roles just don’t seem to come to me!”
Rahim’s philosophy when it comes to the films that he chooses is almost anthropological. As a ‘character actor’ his approach is a deeply analytical one, and rarely do two roles require the same process for him to “catch the characters”.
“As an actor, you are given the right to go through someone’s life and analyse it and find understanding. It’s crazy when you think about it,” he says. “You do it because you try to understand why people make the decisions they do, and if you were put in the same circumstances, what would you do? How would you feel? How would you act? Whether your character is good or evil, people will allow you to be that person, at least for a moment.”
By his own omission, playing Charles Sobhraj—The Serpent’s sociopathic serial-killer —was one of the most challenging roles he has ever taken on.
“It was very, very hard to catch Charles’ mindset. I am an empathetic person, and I could not find any connection with him at all,” says Rahim, “so for the first time in my career, I had to create the character from the outside.”
He was aware of who Sobhraj was, his physical attributes and the way he looked, but early on he struggled to transform into the character on a whim. In order to help him, for the first two weeks he decided not to talk to any of the fellow cast members while on set. He was aloof and distant, almost unnervingly so.
“It created a strange atmosphere on set, and there was a genuine sense of uneasiness when I walked into a room. It was awkward at first, but it showed me elements of a way people would have interacted with Charles that I have not experienced before. After that, I caught the character, and then I relaxed.”
When preparing for roles, particularly ones based on real life people who are still alive, most actors tend to opt to meet them to learn more about them. This was the case for Rahim with regards to Salahi—the Mauritanian. Having read his book, they met several times to discuss, on a deeper level, what life was like within the world’s most infamous detention centre—being routinely tortured for years, but still maintaining the mental capacity to forgive those who had done it to him.
“As far as I was concerned, I was making that film for an audience of one: for Mohamedou,” says Rahim. “I didn’t want him to feel diminished or betrayed when watching the film. This is his story told bare for the world to see, and so I felt an immense amount of pressure to deliver.”
The camaraderie built between the actor and Salahi during the creation of the biopic, is a testament to the quality of Rahim’s performance. He mentions that a bond was formed simply through the sharing of north African culture, and faith.
“The basis of all religion is forgiveness, not just in Islam, but it certainly helped that we shared a cultural shorthand, whether that was our faith or the shared culture between Mauritania and Algeria, where my parents are from.” Rahim explains that you can get a lot from a script, but twenty-or-so pages cannot come close to a lifetime of experience that sits in front of you in person.
For Sobhraj—who is in prison in Nepal serving a life sentence for the murder of an estimated 20 people —it was a different story.
“I thought about meeting him because I wanted to see the way he would try to con me. But ethically, I felt it wasn’t right for the victims and their families,” says Rahim. “Also, he told me that if I wanted to interview him, I would have to pay him! I wasn’t going to give money to a killer.”
Earlier this year, during the annual film awards season, there one narrative that was quietly doing the rounds and stood out to us —there has never been a Muslim ‘Best Actor’ winner in any of the industry’s most coveted awards. It was being talked about, because there were two outstanding actors that were in this year’s consideration, Riz Ahmed for Sound of Metal and Rahim’s role in The Mauritanian. While personally disappointed that the top prizes didn’t end up on either actor’s mantelpiece, it was an important step for inclusion and diversity within a notoriously turgid, but influential industry.
“The way I see it is that movies are made to tell the stories that you can see out of your window, and if that’s not the case, then what is the point?”
“To be honest, I didn’t really think about it, but I can only see it as a good thing,” says Rahim.
“If it can help increase opportunities for people from different backgrounds to get roles that aren’t just stereotypes, and for them to be considered for more roles and money then that is only a good thing.”
For Rahim, representation in films has often been a vital factor in his decision-making process. For years, he would turn down offers from Hollywood and other European film industries offering him parts that pushed an Arab stereotype that not only disagreed with, but one that he didn’t see was prevalent in society. “The way I see it is that movies are made to tell the stories that you can see out of your window, and if that’s not the case, then what is the point?” he says.
The more you discuss film with Rahim, the more you realize why he is drawn to the intense, dramatic roles that he portrays. Not only does he seem to constantly want to challenge himself and plumb the depths of this craft, but he expects the same of the audience as well. “When you make a film, you have the opportunity to make someone question themselves. I don’t want to be part of something if it isn’t going to help make the audience think a little deeper. I consider each movie as a testimonial for future generations.”
So what about the past generation?
What about that 15-year-old kid who was obsessed with going to the movie theatre, and through a mixture of necessity and the thrill of the risk, would sneak in and continually find ways to outsmart the cinema manager? What is the advice that a confident Tahar Rahim and the peak of his powers give to him today?
“At some point you’ve just got to jump in and see what happens.”
Photography Paul Morel / Fashion Direction Anna Castan / Styling Spela Lenarcic / Grooming Jorge Morendeira / Photography Assistance Julien Dauvilier / Produced Elle Hutchinson / Production Manager Johana Dana
Shot on location at Hôtel Molitor Paris—MGallery
