Tahar Rahim

Tahar is in search of truth. Over the past two decades, the actor has built a career defying expectations, refusing easy labels and throwing himself completely into every role. But as he reflects on his most intense performances – including A Prophet, The Mauritanian and his latest Monsieur Aznavour – he reveals that some characters never quite leave you

Tahar Rahim wears Louis Vuitton throughout, photography Maripol

One hour. That’s all the time we have to build the set, set the scene, establish rapport, learn our lines and begin our search for the story within the story. The actor in question is 43-year-old Tahar Rahim, and he is practiced at this. The interviewer in question? Me. I am a little less practiced, but open to being tutored. Our set is a cosy hotel room in the centre of Paris, where Rahim is curled up on a velveteen sofa, dressed down in a t-shirt, jeans and socks, smiling and yawning.

“Do you know the French expression ‘mise en abyme’?” he asks me, seven minutes in, ruffling closely-cropped dark hair. It is the idea of things infinitely recurring within a work of art. A painting which contains a painting of the painting and so on. The literal translation is ‘casting into the abyss’, which seems to suggest the phrase is as much about the search for patterns, as it is about the repetition alone.

All of this is important context for our interview – I use ‘our’ here, not ‘my’ or ‘the’, intentionally – because Rahim, one of the greatest French actors of his generation, is someone who is creating with the intent to find, to discover. And what is he searching for? The freedom of youth, in a life being lived without regrets.

Rahim’s work might have swept the edges of your senses. He played the French serial killer Charles Sobhraj in the hit BBC series The Serpent, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. In 2021 he starred in The Mauritanian, a devastating Hollywood production based on the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man from Mauritania who was held in Guantanamo Bay without charge for 14 years and relentlessly tortured.

More recently, he played the iconic singer Charles Aznavour in his posthumous biopic Monsieur Aznavour (in the UK, you’ll likely remember Aznavour’s song ‘She’ from Notting Hill), and also Ezekiel Sims in Madame Web.

But how did it all begin? In France he exploded onto the scene with a compelling coming-of-age portrayal of a young prisoner in Oscar-nominated film A Prophet (2009). It’s a performance so convincing that you could almost believe that that version of Rahim is still out there, or in there, living his life deep within the criminal underworld.

Rahim knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of 14, growing up in Belfort, north-eastern France. He’s the youngest of ten siblings, and beloved. But, he says, “When I was doing bad things, I had them all on my back. Ten people!” When he talks about his childhood he lights up like a spinning top. He had a happy childhood, he says, spending time with friends, swimming, playing football. It was a multicultural upbringing. His family is Algerian, but his friends were from all over the world. He couldn’t travel like some kids, but he did have an elevator. “If I wanted to visit Africa, I would push button five to visit my friend’s family. If I wanted to go to Asia, that was on the 11th floor,” he says.

He would drink Turkish tea and eat sweetmeats on one floor, then stumble across his friend’s Moroccan mother watching Bollywood films on another. In a Senegalese family’s living room, he would crowd in with them to watch films and eat rice and fish – their hands all digging into the same bowl. “She would cook it like crazy,” he grins of that particular friend’s mother. It was food, travel and culture, all in one small city, imagined inside one small apartment block. Mind-expanding and exciting. “When you’re a kid, you dream of going through and getting inside of the TV. You just want to cross the screen. And that’s exactly what I felt when I would cross their doors.”

But, as alluded, Rahim was sometimes a little bit naughty. From his early teens, he and his friends would break in the back entrance of the local cinema to watch films. Eventually his friends didn’t want to visit any more; they were over the novelty. For Rahim, though, the films never got boring. He continued to sneak in alone. While there he’d enter an almost trance-like state – the feel of the crushed velvet under his fingers, the smell of popcorn, the hugeness of the screen almost swallowing him up, or letting him step inside.

But the manager of the cinema, a bluff man with a big moustache that Rahim illustrates by twirling his fingers, started to clock on to his scheme. “The Tom and Jerry game started,” he laughs. “Really, he wanted to catch me. And I was like, catch me if you can… It went so far that he printed a picture of me and he put it in his office.”

Years later, famous enough to be hosting a screening and Q&A of a new project at a cinema not too far from Belfort, the manager stuck his hand up in the audience and asked Rahim if he remembered him. Of course he did. They spoke afterward, and the manager ended up gifting one of Rahim’s friend’s children a free year-long membership to the cinema. “That’s what he should have done for me!” Rahim says.

In the past, Rahim has spoken about not making the most of his success after A Prophet. “I was scared of becoming a prick… I was afraid of that, because I wasn’t raised this way,” he says. How was he raised? Well, he says, his mother was his hero. “The strongest woman I’ve ever met. She didn’t know how to read, and she learned how to pass her exams, to have her driving license…” But, he adds, his mother gave him “a sense of being always protected, being always loved, whatever happens”.

I wonder if this is the thing that has allowed him to continue to take risks in his career. To allow it to become his obsession. In the past he told a journalist that “Acting isn’t an obsession for me – and it mustn’t be an obsession, it should be just a job.” I wonder if he still believes that. His pedigree suggests otherwise. He’s learnt new languages for roles, including a dead form of Scottish Gaelic. For an upcoming film role, Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, he lost so much weight he became emaciated. He did the same for The Mauritanian, alongside subjecting himself to something close to torture, asking the production team to shackle him with real shackles, to waterboard him, to make the set as freezing as possible.

“I said that it wasn’t an obsession?” he says when I ask him about his earlier statement. He shakes his head. “No, when I work, I’m really obsessed by my characters, by the movie, by the whole thing. I breathe it, I sleep it, I dream it, I live it. But when it’s done, I’m finished. Except for The Mauritanian.” That film took him a few weeks to come out of character. He fixates on the fact that even though he put his body through an extreme experience, he could never really understand what Mohamedou went through.

I ask what he thinks of when he gets stuck on that, as it feels as though he’s experiencing guilt. “Maybe you’re right, I don’t know. Maybe I felt guilty to pretend in front of someone who lived through this.”

The Mauritanian is regarded as Rahim’s breakout role stateside, his red carpet to Hollywood, for which he received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. Beforehand, he worked hard to make his mark there. He knew it wouldn’t be an easy ride. “I knew it. It wasn’t like, okay, France, I’m somebody here. I found it very exciting, because my point each time is that I’m trying to discover a new field of acting. What I’m seeking is the feeling I had with my first movie, to be virgin again, and to start at the very bottom of the ladder. I see my job as a sport…”

Does that mean that you can win, and you can lose? I ponder. He shakes his head. “I’m gonna quote the great Mandela: ‘I never lose. Either I win or I learn’.”

He has faith and he believes in fate. It was fate when he met his wife, the actor Leïla Bekhti, on the set of A Prophet (“I tried to seduce her,” he giggles, tapping his heart. “I knew that she would be the love of my life”). And it was fate that Monsieur Aznavour, his other 2024 film, would end up giving him a taste of a different type of accomplishment, too. “It was the first time I had such a big success in terms of admissions,” he says. “I felt that magical thing when people come to see your movie, like tons of people, and they applaud and do a standing ovation and they cry.”

Even my taxi driver tells me to pass on congratulations to Rahim for the film, which is regarded as a fitting tribute to one of France’s most beloved singers.

There is not enough time with Rahim. He is busy, bright, bubbly and a good storyteller. And good stories take time. Just as we’re getting to midway through my questions, there is only time for one more. I wrap up hurriedly. The story we have found together is one of yearning, searching, that desperate need for some kind of truth in the most fractious time period either of us has ever lived through. Thankfully, as the curtain falls, Rahim doesn’t break character.