Fresh off one of the most ambitious shoots of his career, Tahar Rahim landed at the Marrakech Film Festival buzzing about Fred Cavayé’s dynamic new take on Victor Hugo’s classic “Les Misérable” — likening this new telling to “The Fugitive.”
Starring opposite Vincent Lindon’s Valjean and supported by Noémie Merlant, Camille Cottin and Megan Northam, Rahim says “in this version, [director Fred Cavayé] wanted to focus more on the face-off — the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Javert and Valjean.”
“It’s the same story, but told in a more dynamic way,” Rahim says, before adding It’s become a cultural tradition in France to make this movie every 40 years.”
To leave his mark on Javert, Rahim began by working backward from the character’s endpoint. (A spoiler warning feels almost unnecessary for a story told for more than 160 years, but here it is nonetheless.) Starting with Javert’s final moments helped him make sense of everything that leads up to them
“I wanted to understand why someone — especially through the eyes of a modern audience — would commit suicide just because he suddenly realizes he was wrong,” he explains. “I couldn’t buy it. We had to find an answer, give it to the audience, and then slowly build the character and his obsession with Valjean from there.”
“Now everything is rooted in realism,” he continues. “We can’t really buy the romantic idea of someone who realizes he was wrong and immediately kills himself. We needed an explanation, so we found a little element that’s mentioned in the book but has never been used in any previous version. We took a small seed and made it grow.”
Indeed, Rahim has a knack for that kind of advance work — crafting textured psychological portraits and pairing them with rigorous preparation. “Getting out of a character is never difficult,” he says. “Getting into one is much harder.”
To play Charles Aznavour in 2024’s “Monsieur Aznavour,” he spent six months in vocal training before production began — and then insisted on singing live on set. “At the end of the shoot, the director came to me with good news and bad news,” Rahim recalls. “The good news was that I did well. The bad news was that I’d now have to rerecord everything again — this time properly, in a studio.”
He then shed significant weight to play an addict in Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha,” all while volunteering at a Paris needle-exchange program to better understand his character’s milieu.
“I’m not crazy enough to actually go and try drugs,” says, who is presenting “Alpha” at Marrakech alongside Ducournau who sits on Bong Joon Ho’s jury. “But I needed to find a space, something real, some form of truth I could touch. I even developed this funny little addiction to cherry tomatoes and pistachios. I’d catch myself cutting the cherry tomatoes in two, putting a pistachio inside – almost like a ritual — because addiction is as much about the ritual as the chemical dependency. That’s when I realized, ‘Shit, I’m in it now.’”
“From then on, I understood that they have a void they need to fill,” he continues. “I realized they were wounded kids, seen by common people like ghosts — and they know it. But they still have this little inner boy, this innocent, goofy energy that suddenly pops up. I talked with Julia a lot about that. I said, ‘We have to bring this into the character. We don’t want just a dark man suffering. We need some silliness as well.’”
After unpacking the psychological depths of Javert, Aznavour and the haunted world of Ducournau’s “Alpha,” Rahim shifts gears when the conversation turns to “Madame Web,” in which he played the antagonist in the Spider-Verse spinoff.
The actor is all too aware of the tongue-in-cheek social-media half-life of “Madame Web” — just don’t expect him to go scrolling for memes. “I’ve heard about all that,” Rahim deadpans. He admits he kept his distance. “I didn’t look them up because I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea (…) Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I just did my job!”
“Les Miserables” will be released in French theaters by Studiocanal in November 2026 and is already positioned as one of next year’s major cinema events with its starry cast and splashy budget.