In a world where false narratives feel more prevalent than ever, Tahar Rahim is searching for truth. The French-Algerian actor is gearing up for the U.S. release of Cannes Competition title Alpha from Titane helmer Julia Ducournau, which Neon is releasing on Friday, while next month sees the launch of his latest TV series Prisoners on Sky.
Both roles are vastly different: the former sees him play an addict in a world where a mysterious disease threatens mankind dangerous, while in the latter he’s a high-value prisoner set to testify against an elite crime syndicate. Rahim’s throughline is to approach each role from a place of truth.
“My work is inspired by truth and reality, and I try to always have that in my back pocket,” Rahim tells Deadline. “When you work with a director, it’s obviously important that you adapt to their style, their vision and their perspective but when I feel self-confident enough, I like to let go so that I have a little space of improvisation and create something that would fit in with the vision of the director.”
Rahim is known for choosing roles that explore psychological depth, something that harps back to his acclaimed breakthrough performance as a young man navigating prison life in Jacques Audiard’s 2009 title A Prophet. Prisoners and Alpha take the affable actor on fresh emotional inner journeys.
For Prisoners, Rahim plays treacherous convict Tibor Stone, whose life is put in the hands of a young, principled prison officer Amber (Izuka Hoyle). When their transport convoy is ambushed, the two are forced to run while being shackled to each other and need to work together to reach their destination alive and on time.
The Sky Original series is created by A Bridge of Spies writer Matt Charman and directed by Peaky Blinders helmer Otto Bathurst. Launching at the end of April, it is produced by Binocular and sees Rahim take his first co-executive producer credit, something he puts down to his fantastic collaboration with Charman.
“Each time he would send me a new version of the script, I would tell him what I thought, and I really enjoyed that process,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to have a seat at the artistic table, and I was happy to be able to have a good conversation for the artistic vision to be heard.
“History has taught me that a great relationship between a director or creator and an actor can be marvelous. It’s not about having more power or taking more credits. I’ve always thought two brains work better than one and if something obvious and true and better comes out, it has to win. Matt is just a fantastic collaborator. He is really actor friendly and always open, and he would consider our suggestions and make them even better. That’s a real writer. He wasn’t just taking notes.”
Tahar Rahim in ‘Prisoner’
Rahim admits he is a “big fan” of genre movies made in the 1970s, which is what drew him to the action-packed role. “I never wanted to do an action piece that’s just about the action,” he says. “I needed something more and, in this show, the action is not gratuitous. It’s rooted in the story and is here to help the development of the story and the characters.”
Tibor is a character that is diabetic and has an IQ of 140, so he’s an intelligent but vulnerable man. “I liked it because it’s always fascinating to explore evil because it’s so far outside of the realm of our understanding and you still have a distance that allows you to accept crazy things that a character could do because it’s too far away from you.”
To prep for the role, he worked with a psychologist and watched documentaries about sociopaths. He had just two months after wrapping Alpha until the shoot of Prisoners to gain 15kg of muscles for the role. Intense gym sessions were essential, and he had to learn how to fight and move spatially while shackled to someone.
“He’s a professional assassin,” Rahim says of Tibor. “He had a brutal childhood and became a professional killer at a young age and used those skills to make a living. He’s good at reading people and using their feelings to get what he wants and planting seeds for the future to use the growing plants against him. Over the course of the show, their survival relationship turns into a strange, human relationship. It’s about trust and betrayal – you don’t know who to trust.”
With Alpha, Ducournau’s third feature, the goalposts were different. The film, which focuses on titular teen Alpha (Mélissa Boros) and her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), is set against the backdrop of world where a mysterious contagious blood-borne disease slowly turns patients into marble. Rahim plays Amin, Alpha’s uncle, a man dying of this disease and riddled with drug addiction. He had to lose 20kg for the part, which took him three-and-a-half months to shed. “It wasn’t even a conversation to lose weight,” Rahim recalls. “We knew it was inherent to the project and knowing the way Julia shoots bodies and shapes, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to go flat out to make the audience believe in the character.’”
He spent time volunteering at a facility in Paris called Gaia, which helps people suffering from addiction, to prepare for the role. The experience saw him travel around the French capital in a bus, distributing sterile supplies to drug users.
“I got to spend a lot of time with these marginalized people, and they welcomed me in their most intimate, private moments of their life and in their rituals,” he says.
Rahim admits he didn’t want to reduce Amin to “just his illness” and was keen to give him some lightness rather than focusing solely on the dark side of his addiction.
“He’s a wounded kid so we gave him this innocent, goofy kid energy,” he says. “These people I would see on the streets are human beings, yet they are looked at as ghosts on the side of the street. And they know it, but they are just ill, and that touched me a lot.”
He continues: “The biggest challenge when you portray someone like this is that you are walking on a tightrope and you can easily fall into something that’s too caricatural and you’re scared of that. So, finding the right balance in every pace, was important and the same time I needed to find freedom in this constraint.”
Tahar Rahim in ‘Alpha’
Up next, Rahim stars in Fred Cavayé’s ambitious upcoming adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables in the role of Inspector Javert, the nemesis of ex-convict and parole breaker protagonist Jean Valjean (Vincent Lindon) who is obsessed with tracking him down. Rahim likens this new interpretation to The Fugitive.
“There’s a good rhythm in this film and there is more action and tension than perhaps in previous versions,” he says. “There are still the seeds of Hugo’s book, but we wanted to water them in order to create something that hasn’t been seen before. The literary side is there – it has to be – but there’s also this cat and mouse game with Javert [Rahim] and Valjean [Lindon] throughout and I think that that’s new and it’s good to have this in the movie because it’s an important story and you want the audience to be hooked as well.”
He’s also working on L’Incident, the second feature from French writer-director Victoria Musiedlak, which he stars in with Alba Rohrwacher. The story focuses on a couple – Harry and Appolonia – parents to two little girls who return to France after 15 years abroad. During a holiday at Harry’s parents’ home, Appolonia tells her husband about an inappropriate gesture from her father-in-law and the two argue over whether it was a tasteless joke or a sign of something more disturbing.
“It’s like a family movie and a psychological thriller at the same time,” he says. “You think it’s nothing but slowly, there’s this woollen ball, and you pull the string and then family secrets begin to unravel, and you can’t go back. Harry knows he is going to hurt someone either way and I love that dilemma in a character.”
Alpha releases in the U.S. on March 27 while all episodes of Prisoner will be available on Sky and streaming service NOW at the end of April.