Tahar Rahim makes a character’s growing cunning feel learnt under pressure. We rate him most highly when a film gives that change time to register, as A Prophet does; Napoleon barely gives him a chance.
Fi1m perspective
In A Prophet (2009), Tahar Rahim makes us watch Malik El Djebena working out who can help him and who can hurt him. He arrives in prison as an outsider, and Rahim lets the resourcefulness develop without making the vulnerability disappear. We were unsettled by how much we wanted Malik to master the prison’s alliances, because Rahim makes the danger of getting them wrong so convincing. He never asks us to confuse surviving with being innocent.
Jacques Audiard gives him room to develop in a film that treats alliances as seriously as violence. Niels Arestrup is forceful as César Luciani, but Rahim remains the person we follow most closely. The screenplay by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain sometimes arranges events too neatly to demonstrate Malik’s progress, making us aware of the plotting when we should be watching the people. Rahim keeps the changes believable, and the performance is a substantial reason to recommend the film despite that reservation.
After that breakthrough, Rahim turned down many stereotypical offers and alternated French films with international work. Asghar Farhadi’s The Past (2013) was an early collaboration; The Mauritanian (2021) brought his first major Hollywood lead. Television gave him Charles Sobhraj in the miniseries The Serpent (2021). For Sobhraj, he described starting with the idea of an animal and settling on a cobra.
In Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), the problem is finding enough time for him at all. Rahim plays Paul Barras, but editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo hurry through the years in captions and brief scenes. His scenes are too brief to establish why Barras matters, and there is little an actor can do about a scene that is over before it has developed. We would be wary of choosing that film for Rahim alone. Start with A Prophet, provided a brutal prison drama is the evening you have in mind.
Biography
Tahar Rahim is a French actor. He was born on 4 July 1981 in Belfort, France, and studied film at Paul Valéry University of Montpellier before training in drama at the Laboratoire de l'Acteur in Paris.
Rahim's breakthrough came with the lead role of Malik El Djebena in A Prophet (2009), for which he received the César Award for Best Actor and the César Award for Most Promising Actor. He has since appeared in films including The Eagle (2011), The Past (2013), Mary Magdalene (2018), The Mauritanian (2021), Napoleon (2023) as Paul Barras, and Madame Web (2024) as Ezekiel Sims, as well as the miniseries The Serpent (2021) as Charles Sobhraj.
He is married to actress Leïla Bekhti.
