PortraitSince 2009, thanks to Jacques Audiard’s film, he has made a name for himself in France. A success that he also knows in the Anglo-Saxon world, thanks to series like “The Serpent” and his interpretation in the feature film “Designated guilty”, which earned him a nomination for the Golden Globes. A deserved feat for this 39-year-old actor who has been able to thwart the clichés.
It was February 28, in Los Angeles. That evening, in the salons of the Beverly Hilton hotel, the Golden Globes reward the best films and series of the year. With a particular device: the ceremony is almost remote, with a reduced red carpet, and most of the nominees and guests are on video from their homes. At the time of awarding the statuette for the best actor in a dramatic film, the actress Renée Zellweger takes the stage. A voice announces the selected ones. Rice Ahmed, Chadwick Boseman, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman. Four Anglo-Saxon actors.
Then comes the name of the Frenchman, whose face appears on the screen, the smile filmed by a webcam in Paris, not at all tired despite the jet lag. The 39-year-old actor is nominated for Designated Guilty, by Kevin Macdonald, which is scheduled for release in France on June 2. The winner is Chadwick Boseman, in Ma Rainey’s Blues, by George C. Wolfe. A posthumous award for the actor of Black Panther, died of cancer at age 43 in August. On screen, Tahar Rahim continues to smile.
A taste of victory
Yet he was keen on this price of interpretation. “We all dreamed of being an actor before becoming one, we all dreamed of touching these statuettes, he confides, a few weeks later. So, when you have to play the game, you might as well do it, it is the recognition of a very hard work. “ If the actors nominated for the Golden Globes or the Oscars are usually the object of a campaign expertly orchestrated by the agents and the publicists in the cocktails and the receptions to allure the voters, this year was an exception.
In the countryside, there was none. Otherwise a little media frenzy around Tahar Rahim. Because, with this nomination, he entered the very closed club of French actors who could claim the award, succeeding Gérard Depardieu for Cyrano de Bergerac by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, in 1991, and Jean Dujardin for The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius, in 2012, both winners. The fate will perhaps be more favorable to him, on April 11, at the Bafta, the British equivalent of our Caesars.
Despite the American defeat, this nomination tastes of victory. That of having agreed with Jacques Audiard when he wrote, at the end of the 2000s, the screenplay for a film describing the incarceration of a 19-year-old young man who, once in his remand center , would meet the Corsican mafias and Islamist networks. Audiard summed up its story as follows: “ He is a young man who has no history and is going to write one before our eyes. “ He did not know then that he would entrust the role to a newbie, Tahar Rahim, and that the film, a prophet, would win the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes. And he did not know that the story of the young man would first be written on the steps of the festival.
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