Interview: Tahar Rahim, actor in A Prophet and Free Men

French-Algerian Tahar Rahim has the acting world at his feet, but, finds Alistair Harkness, he’s in no rush to work in America

EVERY young unknown actor dreams of the breakthrough role that’s going to catapult them into the big league, but it’s hard to imagine a better showcase than the one Tahar Rahim received when Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet premiered at Cannes just over three years ago. Not only did the French-Algerian actor find himself the star of an award-winning movie that proved the toast of the festival (it won the Grand Prix), his character’s journey from anonymous low-level prison inmate to crime kingpin seemed to mirror his own transformation from nervy hopeful to fully fledged movie star within the space of two-and-a-half hours .

Flash-forward three years and, after a couple of co-starring roles in international misfires such as The Eagle and Black Gold, the 31-year-old Rahim is starting to make good on that promise with a starring role in Free Men, an intriguing, socially conscious Second World War saga detailing the little-known story of how Muslim North African immigrants in Paris helped the French Resistance to shield immigrant Jews from the German occupying forces.

“Nobody really knows about this story, even in France,” says Rahim, who plays Younes, a self-centered Algerian Muslim immigrant awakened to the Jewish plight after the authorities try to coerce him into spying on the mosque suspected of supplying Jews with falsified papers. “That’s why I wanted to make it. It was amazing to discover this story and to realise it has never been told.”

That may be so, but what’s also notable about the film is that Rahim’s role is exactly the sort that might once have been earmarked for a big Holywood star, especially since there’s more than a hint of the character Humphrey Bogart played in Casablanca in the way that Younes never seems to act out of anything but self-interest, yet eventually manages to do the right thing.

“Hah, you said that, not me,” laughs Rahim, clearly not wishing to have his performance casually compared with one of the most iconic roles in cinema history. “But I suppose some of the internal questions they ask themselves might be similar. I’m thinking only about myself and then I realise that’s wrong and I have to make a choice – and that’s what happens to them both, really.”

The fact that a film like Free Men can now get financed with an actor of the same ethnicity as the character, however, is reflective of a small but positive and important change that seems to be taking place in France as its national cinema becomes more reflective of the country’s cultural diversity. Following the award-winning Days of Glory and its semi-sequel Outside the Law, for instance, Free Men is very much part of a growing number of high-profile historical dramas coming out of France in which the stories of immigrants of North African descent are finally being told from the perspective of the very people they’re about.

“I think that there’s a moment when you can’t deny the reality on the streets,” says Rahim by way of explanation. “You know, what is art? Art talks about life; it’s subversive. There’s a moment when you can’t hide that reality and you have to tell people what you see.”

But as A Prophet also proved, this change seems to be extending beyond socially conscious filmmaking. After Rahim’s blistering performance in that film, a number of commentators began to wonder whether it would open the door to other French actors of Algerian or Moroccan descent in the same way that The Godfather and Mean Streets opened up Hollywood for Italian-American actors such as Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the 1970s.

Rahim isn’t sure how valid the parallel is, though: “I think there’s a little similarity in the fact that a minority has been under-represented on the screen. But they had so many great [Italian-American] directors and screenwriters; that’s why that happened. If we had all that talent, perhaps we could do that too, but I don’t think we do yet.”

At the very least, though, A Prophet’s worldwide critical and commercial success had a palpable effect on Rahim, who’d been dreaming about being an actor since the age of 14. Back then, to stave off the boredom of his home city of Belfort in eastern France, he’d go to the cinema five times a week. After university, that passion for movies finally led him to film school, in Montpellier, where he appeared in a mock documentary entitled Tahir the Student, a fictionalised account of his time at university that was shown on French television.

“We made it like a movie,” he explains of the 2005 film. “It was about what it was like to be a student in France at this time: without a job, without money and worried about the future.” Moving to Paris soon after to make a go of acting, he scored a part in a 2007 French TV series called La Commune, the writer of which was Abdel Raouf Dafri, who went on to co-script A Prophet and, rather fortuitously, put Rahim on his friend Jacques Audiard’s radar when the latter visited the set and ended up sharing a car with Rahim.

“I’m very thankful for that,” laughs Rahim. “I can do what I want now and that’s a luxury for an actor.” As for the future, while he’s in no rush to work in America. “I got a few propositions from Hollywood, but I didn’t want to go play a terrorist,” he sighs. He’ll next be seen in the intense-sounding French relationship drama Loving Without Reason, which premiered in competition at Cannes earlier this week.

He’s also currently shooting L’aviseur, an undercover cop movie written, once again, by Abdel Raouf Dafri. Given that this will mark their third collaboration, it’s only natural to wonder whether the pair would ever consider re-teaming with Audiard to make the sequel to A Prophet that its enigmatic ending suggested might be on the cards. “Ha ha, you’ll have to ask Mr Audiard about that,” teases Rahim. “But it’s something I would love to do.”

• Free Men is in cinemas from tomorrow