The two met while appearing in the crime drama A Prophet together. At the time, Tahar was 26 while Leïla was 23. The two tied the knot in 2010 after three years of dating. In 2017, they welcomed their first child together, a boy named Souleymane. Last year they became a family of four with the arrival of a second child, a daughter. What the film's creative team didn’t want to do is fall into the trap of framing Slahi as anything less than a human being. The Mauritanian does portray some of the harsh treatment he experienced but as soon as torture enters the narrative, the audience is transported into Slahi's memories of his life before his detention. "As soon as you torture a character they become unsympathetic, which is bizarre," Carlin says. "But we didn't want to make torture porn so Kevin and the writers take him out of that space when those horrible things were happening and into his past which enables you to keep seeing him as a human being."

Tahar Rahim | César & Nominations" (in French). Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma . Retrieved 5 April 2023.When Mohamedou Ould Slahi came to South Africa to visit the set of The Mauritanian, it was a strange and complicated experience, he says. The film tells the story of Slahi’s experience as possibly the highest-profile detainee at the infamous Guantánamo Bay camp in Cuba. He was kidnapped, tortured in ways barely imaginable and incarcerated for 14 years, but never charged with a crime. Now he was walking around an uncanny replica of his former prison, on a sun-baked set near Cape Town.

When his family lived in Algeria, his father was a teacher, and upon their migration to France, his father became a worker. Tahar is one of the ten children of his parents; one of his brothers’ name is Ahmed Rahim. Wife & Children Despite being a bestselling author, Slahi had no involvement in the film’s screenplay, which was written by MB Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani. It is a different ballgame, he says: “Writing is like driving a car. Writing the beats of a screenplay? It’s like driving a rover on Mars. You have to be absolutely, extremely precise.” I’m not looking to get even with anyone in my life’ ... Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Nouakchott, Mauritania, after being released from Guantánamo. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Rahim, known for his critically-acclaimed role in 2009 French prison drama A Prophet and 2018’s 9/11 miniseries The Looming Tower (where he played real-life FBI agent Ali Soufan who also appeared in The Report), has done his best to avoid being cast as one of the many Muslim terrorist characters created for film and TV over the last 20 years. But reading the script for The Mauritanian, he found it to be one of the few that had a "sympathetic Muslim character at the heart of an American movie," and felt empowered to come on board the project as a result. "I needed to know that [Slahi] is innocent because if he was a terrorist I don’t think I would have done this movie," Rahim says. "I'm not saying that there are no terrorists. A small fraction of these people are taking the whole attention and we don’t even see the others and these people are suffering as much."

In 2021, he appeared in the British TV series ‘The Serpent,’ which was co-produced by BBC One and Netflix. In the series, he appeared in the title role of Charles Sobhraj, also known as The Serpent. Talking about his attraction towards playing Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent, Tahar said that he read ‘The Life and Times of Charles Sobhraj’ by Richard Neville and Julie Clarke, a book he bumped into when he was fourteen. Each time he read the book, he felt like it was a movie and wanted to play the character. He added, As Rahim begins to open up about his family and his religion, he tells me that he believes little is left to chance. He had to work his way up from the very bottom after moving to Paris as a young man in 2006, trying for roles while working at factories and nightclubs to survive. For plenty of actors, there would be a sense of entitlement at how far he has come, but Tahar is humble. He owes much of his success to his family and his faith, he says. “It’s hard to explain. I have a strong connection to God,” he adds, his warm smile making way for a more thoughtful expression, “This connection feeds me and I believe that it reminds me who I am.” The Last Panthers – exclusive trailer for the Samantha Morton thriller". The Guardian . Retrieved 23 December 2022.