Mohamedou Ould Salahi endured unimaginable horror as an inmate of the U.S. government’s notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center for more than 14 years.
In all that time, no charge was ever leveled against him, and with the help of his tireless lawyer Nancy Hollander, who weathered extreme criticism for representing terror suspects, he was finally granted his freedom in 2016.
His story is the subject of director Kevin Macdonald’s new film The Mauritanian, based on the memoir Salahi wrote in confinement, in which Tahar Rahim telegraphs the pain and resolve of a casualty of America’s heavy-handed war on terror.
Yet, as Rahim explains, it was a role he might have dismissed before reading it…DEADLINE: You last worked with Kevin Macdonald on