The exploits of Charles Sobhraj have spawned a host of books, television shows and movies, including the Hindi-language production Main Au...
The exploits of Charles Sobhraj have spawned a host of books, television shows and movies, including the Hindi-language production Main Aur Charles in 2015. Prawal Raman’s film, starring Randeep Hooda, focused on the time spent by the career criminal spent in India in the late 1970s and 1980s. The deadly trail of deception, identity swapping, drugs, gems and bodies that preceded Sobhraj’s Delhi adventure is charted by the BBC miniseries The Serpent. Sobhraj is played by the French actor Tahar Rahim, whose previous credits include A Prophet, The Past and The Kindness of Strangers.
The eight-episode series was released on January 1 on the BBC iPlayer streaming platform. Among the sources of The Serpent, written by Richard Warlow and directed by Tom Shankland, is Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s Bad Blood: The Life and Crimes and Charles Sobhraj. Sobhraj’s slithery ways earned him the epithet “Serpent”, which also inspired Thomas Thompson’s non-fiction book Serpentine in 1979 and the Australian television series Shadow of the Cobra in 1989.
Sobhraj is now 76 years old, lodged in a prison in Nepal. Sobhraj has remained in the Kathmandu jail for almost two decades, despite his record of notorious jailbreaks.
“It doesn’t matter how good they are at catching me, I will always escape,” Tahar Rahim’s Sobhraj brags in The Serpent.
