Get to Know Tahar Rahim, the French Actor Starring in The Mauritanian

In the Oscar-nominated film, he plays Malik, a 19-year-old French-Algerian man who is imprisoned for attacking police officers. While in jail, he learns about the prison's factions and hierarchies, forced to engage in dicey tasks while incarcerated.

Rahim met his wife, actress Leïla Bekhti, while shooting A Prophet. The couple have two children, a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter. (Bekhti actually played his onscreen wife in Damien Chazelle's The Eddy, too).

In an interview with Variety, Rahim revealed that he would sneak into movie theatres when he was a teenager. "So when I was around 13 or 14, I used to hang around and go to the movies. But, I couldn't really afford it. So I found a way to get in from the back door. And I would go there five times a week. And over the course of watching movies, I started to feel something in that place — the movie theatre itself. It was something like being in an unconscious dream space," Rahim explained.

Born to parents who immigrated from Algeria to France, he's the youngest of ten siblings. He and his family grew up in Belfort in the north-eastern region of France.

Slahi was held at Guantánamo Bay without charge for 14 years, and The Mauritanian is based on his book, Guantánamo Diary. Rahim almost considered meeting up with Charles Sobhraj but decided not to out of respect for the serial killer's victims.

Rahim first studied drama at the Paul Valery University of Montpellier. He then studied it in Paris at the Laboratoire de l'Acteur — he was also working at a factory and nightclub in the meanwhile.

"I know I wasn't ready. You know, when I worked with Kevin [Macdonald] on The Eagle, I could barely speak English. So it would have been hard to work in America or England before, but also the parts that I got offered are not convincing, and I had to turn them down," Rahim told Slash Film. Eventually, however, he would go on to star in 2018's The Looming Tower and Mary Magdalene. In The Looming Tower, he worked with a coach for four hours a day to nail down an American accent.

"These actors are timeless icons, like John Cazale, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep," Rahim told Vogue Arabia. He was interested in how these '70s actors would play characters from real life.

With The Serpent, Rahim had to bulk up for the part of Sobhraj, and with The Mauritanian, he had to lose 10 kilos in 10 days to play Slahi — it's a kind of dedication akin to Christian Bale's.