From Guantanamo Bay Survivor to Serial Killer, Tahar Rahim Has the Range

Few actors get a chance to make as deep and lasting an impression as early in their careers as Tahar Rahim did with Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. The 2009 film put Rahim, then best known for a supporting role on a French TV miniseries, front-and-center in nearly every scene of an intense crime drama that takes his character from naïve teenager to criminal kingpin over the course of a long prison stint. It’s the sort of breakthrough performance that opens up doors for young actors. But while others might have looked for the nearest Hollywood franchise, Rahim has mostly worked with a string of well-known international directors, appearing in projects like Fatih Akin’s The Cut and Asgar Farhadi’s The Past, while making only the occasional venture into the world of English-language roles, most notably a part in Scottish director’s Kevin Macdonald’s 2011 historical drama The Eagle.

Those English-language roles have started to become more frequent over the past few years, however, thanks to high-profile projects like Hulu’s fact-based 9/11 miniseries The Looming Tower and Netflix’s The Eddy (in which Rahim appeared opposite his wife Leïla Bekhti). For The Mauritanian, Rahim reunited with Macdonald to play Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who, though never charged, spent fourteen years as a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp after being brought there from his native Mauritanian via the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The film tells two overlapping stories. In one, lawyers Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) work to free Salahi. In the other, Salahi struggles to stay sane and hopeful in the face of humiliation and torture (experiences the real Salahi chronicled in his 2015 memoir Guantanamo Diary).

Rahim delivers an intense, openhearted performance that’s earned him Oscar buzz and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama. (The award went to Chadwick Boseman posthumously, but Rahim’s co-star Foster won the Supporting Actress trophy.) It’s the mirror image of his work in The Serpent, a BBC-produced limited series set to debut on Netflix on April 2. There, Rahim plays Charles Sobhraj, a cool, charismatic con artist who left a trail of bodies across Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Via Zoom from his home in France, the upbeat Rahim spoke to GQ about breaking into movies with no connections as the son of Algerian immigrants in the east of France, what it takes to inhabit such dramatically different men as Salahi and Sobhraj, lessons learned from Mark Strong and Robert De Niro, and the joys of the English language.

When did you first become aware of Mohamedou Ould Salahi's story?

When I read the script. I’d never heard of him before. I never read his book. When Kevin sent me the script, I was very happy, as an actor, to get this part. It's a beautiful part with a lot of depth and big challenges. But at the same time I felt angry. I felt sad knowing it's a true story and what he's been through. When I finished it, I cried. I was astonished by his ability to forgive people. I really wanted to meet him, but I had to wait. I was like, "I’ve got to read the script and the book first to know more about what he's been through and about Guantanamo.”

When you have a character like this, where there's a lot of written material and where you can actually talk to the person themselves, do you find that helpful?

Oh yeah, of course. Look, if it was a fiction, I would've been talking with my director, with the screenwriters, back and forth. “Maybe he's talking this way,” or “Maybe he likes ice cream, but I don't think so.” You start to talk and sometimes start arguing. But the man is here, so every question that I had, I could ask him. It's not about 120 pages. It's about a lifetime. It's the best source you can get, when it's appropriate to meet the real-life person. In The Serpent I play a serial killer. I didn't want to meet him. He was still alive. I'm like, "No. Not going to give him much attention, out of respect to the victims.” It's an ethics thing.

What were your conversations with Salahi like?

It was great. I was surprised to see that a man who's been through this could be like him: full of joy, no resentment, no anger, no nothing. I was like, "Whoa." Because I started to have some preconceived ideas, about the way I would portray him. He was full of goodwill and wanted to know more about me. He's not faking anything. That's him. I think he might be a gifted soul and by going through this — I don't know if I can say “ordeal” or “nightmare” — he developed another philosophy.

I wanted to know about this, but first of all, I felt like maybe I should ask him some questions about himself and about the darkest moments in Guantanamo. And once I started to talk about it, his face changed and he was suddenly... the mood changed and he was so sad and it was even harder for him just to talk. He was trying to, and I felt like I was bothering him or disrespecting him. I didn't want to make him feel bad. He has been through so, so much and who am I to bring him back there? So I never, ever asked him questions about the torture.

Then we started to develop a relationship like two friends. I came to realize that when you meet someone that extraordinary, it's beyond my job. It's like a present. You talk to someone who's got this philosophy, who's been through this. And if you would tell me, "Oh, I once met Mandela,” I'd be jealous. I'd be like, "Oh man. So what happened?" And he's the same level. It's just that he's not famous, yet.

I wanted to take advantage of this to feed the man. And of course it would feed the actor and that was amazing. By talking to him I observed him a lot and tried to catch his spirit and understand the way he thinks, the way he talks, the way he looks at you. And the way he would answer questions, because he was getting questioned a lot in the movie. I needed to understand how you can be able to not hold grudges against anyone. And he told me when you realize that forgiving people is a treat to yourself, you free your mind. And then you can escape.

There aren’t a lot of films about Guantanamo and I had no idea what it looked like, especially the inside, or what the actual environment was like. Was that your situation before making the film?

I’d heard about it on the news, the way prisoners had been treated and the pictures. So I knew about it, but barely. Once I started to get interested in Guantanamo [I understood] it was inhuman. The prisoners were treated like animals. Worse, they were treated like disease. Guards would wear rubber gloves and masks. They would call the prisoners by numbers, treat them as if they were viruses.

Mohamedou sent me some items that I would use in the movie, like a rubber pen, the suit, the notepad and things like that. But I discovered what Guantanamo was when I got on set. I remember, the first day, I was very impressed. They did such a great job and I wanted to sneak around and just get a feel of what it is. I laid down on a bed and it was so small: one light turned on 24/7, no windows, no mirrors. You lose time and space. Everything was made out of metal, so even the sound was terrifying. I just started to feel bad. I thought, “How's that? How's that possible to treat a human being like this?” It’s beyond being guilty or not. You don't torture people. We live in democracies to be protected and there's the rule of law to be respected. Thinking that fear can lead people and democracies to behave this way is scary, and it has to stop.

The film takes place over many years and your character goes through an intense journey. Did you try to shoot it in sequence?

Not really. But we shot the whole torture process at the end of the shooting. We needed to because I had to lose a lot of weight and I didn't have enough time to lose it. So I went hard. I did a very drastic diet. Schedule-wise, we needed to do it this way. And I was exhausted. Those six days were crazy.

The torture scenes looked convincingly unsimulated. How intense were they to shoot?

Very intense… at the end it was not even about a performance. It was more experiential. I felt like, as an actor, I had an opportunity to, in a way, touch a sort of truth. And that's what you're looking for as an actor. And it's not always possible. It depends on the movie, the story, the part, and this time the further I would go, the further I wanted to dig, more and more and more until Kevin started to get worried. He came to me saying, "You know, man, your ankles are bleeding. You know, it's okay. We got it. I believe in this." And I'm like, "Don't worry, Kevin, I'm not going to hurt myself. I'm not going to die." I need to go that far because I needed to believe in what it was doing. Out of respect to Mohamedou and the audience I needed to embrace this authenticity.

Otherwise, how could I possibly know what it is to, to be tortured? I mean, I can imagine it. You know when you play an instrument… If you have to play a trumpet, for example, which I did on a show. Okay. I learn. I practice, I practice, I practice for days and then you can come on and you can just play. This time, how could I train? [Laughs.] I could waterboard myself in my home? Let's try it! You can't do it. So I had to experience it.

You share only a handful of scenes with the other leads, Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley. In a situation like that, do you feel like the stakes are higher for those scenes?

I think that every scene needs to be at the top every second, but having Jodie, the iconic Jodie, she's just the coolest. She's so great. I mean, every time she's on screen you're just like, okay! Shailene as well. I needed to believe in what we were doing and it was easy with them in front of me to always bring everything to reality so I forget that I'm acting. Jodie, her character, Nancy Hollander was a bit tough with Mohamedou. I know that it was very hard for Mohamedou because he wanted her to say, "Yes, you’re innocent." Her job is to defend him whether he’s innocent or not, but he needed this. So I felt like each time it would be hard for me to get Nancy Hollander.

I would watch Shailene. She was so nice, so real and her eyes, they'd just soothe my pain. So I would play back and forth like this, and it was an honor to play with them, really. They helped me out a lot. They raised the game and when you're well-prepared, you just have to follow. There are different types of actors. And sometimes it's less cool for me because they play against each other and not with each other. And this is what, what happened with them. We were dancing together.

I started watching The Serpent. That's really chilling stuff. Do you get whiplash going from playing a character like Salahi, whose emotions are always on the surface, to a character who tries to convey as little emotion as possible?

It was very tough to play Charles. Because you need to find connections with your character and with Mohamedou I happened to have some tools to portray him, but with Charles, nothing. I was trying and trying. Usually I start to work from inside. And then it comes out in one way or another, and I couldn't do it. Two things happened: First, I was like, okay, it's not working. it's not working, so let's try it from the outside. Tom Shankland, the director, helped me a lot. The first two weeks were very tough for me. I really needed to be directed. So we found his look and we had some testimonies from the people that met Charles. I had some recordings.

And it was not enough. I was like, “Fuck, I'm still me.” And I would try and try and talk with Tom. And then I thought of an animal. I remember Robert De Niro did this in Taxi Driver and his animal was a crab. So I rewatched some scenes. When he approaches people, he paces like this. [Makes a crab-walking gesture.] He doesn't walk towards them. He goes on the side and walks like this. And it's very subtle. So I thought of a serpent, of course, specifically the cobra. The cobra has charm and it's a bit hypnotic. When he hunts his prey he’s very still. And, when he bites it is very, very sudden. Boom. So you don't even see him. And it was not enough. I started thinking, “When's it going to happen?”

Then I found one connection with Charles. In the third episode he says something like, "If I had to wait for the world to come to me, I'd be waiting, still. Everything I had, I wanted, I had to take it". And I'm like, okay, this is something. Because I come from the working class suburbs in the east of France. So no connection with the business. I wanted to be an actor since I was a teenager and I knew that if I was going to be an actor, I had to take it. So I watched a lot of movies, read a lot of things about movies. I studied cinema at school. I passed my degree at university and then I went to Paris with my bag and a little bit of money in my pocket. I didn't know where I would sleep. And it went well. So this connection [with Charles] worked, after two weeks.

Mark Strong is an actor I admire and a very good man. We did a movie together a long time ago where he played my dad, a king. And he told me once, when you play the king, you don't play the king. People surrounding you are playing the fact that you are the king. Apart from Jenna, because her character was involved in Charles’ criminal life, I self-isolated from my co-stars. Because I needed to focus first and I didn't want to talk to them at all. So each time they would come and talk to me, I wouldn't answer. I had those glasses and that hair and it started to create a strange mood, a bit awkward. Each time I would come on set, it would change their behavior a little bit. When we would wrap, I would talk with them, have a drink or whatever. But on set, it was like this for at least two weeks. And it created something. And after two weeks I had them. And the day I was certain about it is when one of the actors playing the people I'm manipulating, off set he befriended some people. And I started to feel strange, as if I was losing him. But it was not on set and I was not playing Charlies and I felt like, okay, I got it.

One thing that’s striking about your filmography is that you probably had all kinds of offers after A Prophet. And you chose to work with Asgar Farhadi, Fatih Akin, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa and other renowned world cinema directors. How conscious was the choice to go down that route?

I want to make movies that I want to see. I'm still an audience member. And I think that my taste for foreign culture comes from my childhood. The suburb I grew up in, was full of people from all over the world: Asians, North Africans, Africans, Spanish, Eastern Europeans, French. And we would spend so much time together and would go to each other's houses and meet each other's parents and absorb their culture, music, movies, food. This is where I'm from. And the parts were better and they're directors that I admire.

It seems like you’re doing more English-language projects now. Are the roles getting better?

Yeah. And I love to play in English. When you play in a language that’s not your mother language it’s like when the music is different. With the English language you stress some words differently than in French. The frequency is different. So your face moves differently. Your body moves differently. And, plus in America, for example, they have a mythology of movies, some parts that you will never get in France because we don't have that mythology. You feel like being a virgin again because it's all new and you don't overthink your words. You get the sense, the meanings. Okay. Just let's go and try it. And I don't know why, but it's very… it's fun.

Originally Appeared on GQ