FRANCE’S MOST POWERFUL YOUNG ACTOR IS UNABASHEDLY PROUD OF HIS ROOTS, BUT WITH ONE EYE ON AMERICA, IT WON’T BE LONG UNTIL HE CALLS HOLLYWOOD HIS HOME

PHOTOGRAPHY NICK KNIGHT
FASHION CARINE ROITFELD
TEXT GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

“I am French, I know that; I’ve never had a problem because that’s simply who I am. But at the same time I’ve never been interested in hiding my family’s Algerian origins. I’ve always known that would be a mistake.” The 30-year-old Tahar Rahim is best known to international audiences for his role as Malik El Djebena, a newbie inmate turned gangland don, in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, which took home the prestigious Grand Prix at Cannes. It’s one of the most virtuosic performances in the history of the criminal-education genre; his slow hardening from shivery naïf to tempered, winning villain is as heartrending as it is terrifying, and it’s no surprise that it gained him all manner of international acclaim. But if he’s going to become one of his generation’s great international film stars, he’s going to do it on his own terms. In a strange way, there are parallels between his rise as an actor and El Djebena’s ascent to thug and racketeer: both of them bridle at the presumption of group solidarity based on the accidents of birth.

Rahim was born in Belfort, France, near the German border, and studied sports and computer science in Strasbourg and Marseille before heading to Montpellier for a film program. He finally landed in Paris in 2005, where he enrolled in a prestigious drama school. It was there that Rahim began to work out his ideas about what it meant to be a minority working in French cinema.

“In drama school, everyone thought the problem was that those of us of foreign descent had to show France, and the world, that we could play a French person with a French name. But that’s not the problem anymore, or at least not my problem.” For Rahim, the struggle shouldn’t be about overcoming one’s background—pretending that your family has lived in France for hundreds of years—because that only reinforces the attitude that the only true national identities are long-inherited ones. This is exactly the problem El Djebena confronts upon his arrival in prison: raised in an orphanage without religion, El Djebena feels no natural sense of solidarity with the Muslim inmates, though he can speak their language. He ends up forced into the protective employ of the Corsican mafia, but despite his imagination and competence he knows he’ll never be taken as one of them; to them, he’s just a dirty Arab. Uncomfortable with the presumption of loyalty based on ethnicity but denied the fact of loyalty based on service and effort, El Djebena develops an allegiance only to himself.

Though El Djebena’s ascent to ruthless self-assurance bears, one would at least hope, little resemblance to Rahim’s, they come to similar senses of refuge. For Rahim, the work of the actor is to accept and understand that there is no such thing as a “typical” person and no such thing as an “authentic” Frenchman: what an actor does is invest a compelling individual with the right to tell his own story. “Being an actor should mean that I can play anything. Well, maybe not some blond Norwegian,” he says with a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “But as actors and filmmakers we have to take it on ourselves to tell stories about everyone, French people of French descent, French people of Arabic descent, French people of African descent. We have to be able to invent different heroes for the culture.”

When it comes to these questions, Rahim is thoughtful and articulate, but he’s also clear that, in an ideal world, he wouldn’t have to talk about this as often as he does. He seems like a pretty unruffled guy but I can tell he’s grown bored of having to chat about his hyphenated existence. “When I am in France I am always being asked about my origin. In America this is not a question people ask.” This is one of the reasons Rahim looks forward to working with American directors. “When Denzel Washington gives an interview, nobody ever asks him where his family came from originally, they just accept that he is an American actor. In America you have crossed this bridge, but we are still working on it.”

Rahim agrees that things in the world of French cinema are much better than they were, referring to the commercial French films of the ’90s, where minorities were mostly relegated to stereotypical minority roles. But, especially in the wake of successful North African cultural figures such as Jamel Debbouze, the French-Moroccan actor and comedian who’s become one of the most popular entertainers in France, the terms of the conversation have changed. Rahim no longer feels as though he needs to engage with these questions in an explicit way. Instead, he just gets on with his work. He’s already become known for his Method ethic, and spoke at length to a German magazine about the experience of spending nights in the solitary-confinement cell as he prepared for his role as El Djebena. For him, the meaning of being an actor lies in a strenuous commitment to plasticity, the opposite of a fixed and claustrophobic ethnic identity. “I’m an actor, I’m here to do my job, not to plant a flag or start a fight, and that’s a political thing to do, a political way to be—to just insist that I’m here, I’m French with Algerian roots, and I’m here to do my job and act. I’m not interested in talking about what it means to be a minority working as an actor, I’m just interested in the work of the performance.”

Which isn’t to say that he shies away from roles with explicit political significance. Both of his two big roles since A Prophet have had broad social relevance. This past year has seen the release of Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Les Hommes Libres (Free Men), in which Rahim plays one of the little-known French Muslim soldiers who fought against the Nazi occupation, cooperating with the Resistance and secretly harboring Jews. “It was really important to take part in a film that talked about those people, that told their stories—stories that most people in France didn’t know.” Rahim also made Love and Bruises with the Chinese director Lou Ye, who’s had to struggle with government censors to get his movies made. Love and Bruises is making the festival rounds now, having recently shown in Toronto and elsewhere.

It surely can’t be long before Hollywood sends for him, and Rahim is looking forward to it. “There are so many great American directors and screenwriters, so many more working in the States than we have in Europe.” He names the obvious ones, saying he’s long admired the films of Steven Soderbergh and Martin Scorcese and admits, with another self-deprecating giggle, that “Spielberg is still Spielberg,” but says that his favorite contemporary directors aren’t as well known. He greatly admires James Gray’s films Two Lovers and We Own the Night, and would love to work with Courtney Hunt, whose Frozen River got a lot of attention a few years ago.

He’s also looking forward to doing more acting in English. In A Prophet, Rahim acts in Arabic, French, and Corsican. He says one of the great challenges and pleasures of being in that film—and in Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, where he got the chance to deliver his lines in Gaelic—was the opportunity it gave him to inhabit his character in a different way. “When it’s a different language you’re not used to speaking every day, you have to be careful, to step out of your own shoes. It’s a different kind of music, a different accent, and a different set of stresses. You have to be a scholar of the role in a new way, understand the character in ways you’re not used to.” Again, it’s the joy of the work itself that provides such satisfaction for Rahim, and the joy of his work that will, if we’re lucky, provide such satisfaction to an ever-growing international audience.

All clothes Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière
Socks Happy Socks
Ring (worn throughout) Rahim’s own

Hair Sam McKnight for Pantene
Photo assistants Laura Falconer,
Chloe Orefice, Roo Kendall, Jeff Yui
Digital capture Joe Colley (Passeridae Ltd)
Hair assistant Cyndia Harvey
Location Park Royal Studio
Digital post Tom Wandrag (Epilogue Imaging Ltd)
Lighting by Direct
Special thanks Adam Slee (Streeters),
Gemma Howorth (Body London), Lionel Vermeil

KEYWORDS: Carine Roitfeld, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Nick Knight, Tahar Rahim, vman 25