Charles Sobhraj brutally murdered at least 10 backpackers in south-east Asia. Did Tahar Rahim worry about glamorising the murderer in slick new TV drama The Serpent?
Of all the things you might expect to hear come from the mouth of Tahar Rahim, the charismatic French-Algerian star of the hit
prison thriller A Prophet and the new serial-killer series The Serpent, the least likely must be: “Have you ever heard of Tring?” Yet here he is, speaking over Zoom from his home in
Paris, and dumping on the sleepy Hertfordshire market town. “There’s nothing to do there,” he says. “It’s got, like, a main street and that’s it.”
It’s unlikely the 39-year-old would ever have visited but for the pandemic, which interrupted the
shooting of The Serpent, a BBC/Netflix production, for five months. Once filming resumed in August, a return to the original locations in
Thailand was out of the question. Somewhat implausibly, Tring stepped in.