Dar Salim, the airline pilot turned actor who keeps reaching for the director’s chair

Dar Salim

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 18, 1977 Baghdad, Iraq
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Head Full of Honey
Awards	Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (shared) · 2 Zulu

Dar Salim learned to fly before he learned to act, and the instinct never left him. For most of his screen career the Iraqi-born Danish actor has been the steady man in somebody else’s war: a Dothraki warrior in Game of Thrones, the Afghan interpreter who hauls a wounded Jake Gyllenhaal through mountain country in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, the Iraqi special forces officer beside Taylor Kitsch in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Lately he has wanted something those parts never offered him, which is a hand on the controls. The last Danish film he carried came out with his name on a credit its own director had resisted.

The road to that credit ran through more borders than film sets. Salim was born in Baghdad, and his parents left Iraq with him when he was a year old. The family spent six years in transit, with long stops in Syria and Bulgaria, before settling on Amager, the island on Copenhagen’s southern edge, when he was seven. He grew up on the Urbanplanen estate and held a karate black belt in his mid-teens. Then he dropped it.

After school he served in the Royal Life Guards and took whatever work paid: substitute teacher, baggage handler, bartender, fitness instructor. The money went into flight school. He qualified in the shadow of 11 September 2001, when an airline cockpit was a hard place to reach with an Arab name, and the carrier that had a job waiting for him went bankrupt two weeks before he was due to start. He did eventually fly, for years, with a large airline. Acting arrived sideways. A friend dragged him to a casting, and in 2003 he landed a guest lead in the TV 2 drama Forsvar.

For a while he did both jobs. His first film lead, the title role in Omar Shargawi’s Go With Peace, Jamil, earned a Bodil nomination for best actor in 2009, and parts followed in Thomas Vinterberg’s Submarino and Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double. The role that made Danish viewers learn his face, the Green Party leader Amir Diwan in DR’s Borgen, he played while still flying full time, and he has never been gentle about the result. His mistakes, he told the magazine Soundvenue, went out to the whole country on Sunday night at eight; for the entire first season he felt he was kicking with the wrong foot. He went to the William Esper Studio in New York and took method classes in London. When his first son was born, he resigned from the airline by guiding the baby’s finger to the mouse button that sent the email.

The same year brought Game of Thrones. He auditioned for Khal Drogo, came close, and was cast instead as Qotho, one of the Dothraki riders around the warlord in the first season. The decade that followed split along a line that still defines him. At home he got leads and men with interior lives, from Bo Skytte in the crime series Dicte, which brought him Robert nominations, to Zaid, the heart surgeon dragged into Copenhagen’s criminal underworld in Fenar Ahmad’s Darkland. In war stories he was more often a commander or a soldier: Commander Khyan in Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings, Najib Bisma in Tobias Lindholm’s A War, after a turn in Lindholm’s A Hijacking.

Darkland was the turn. It brought Bodil and Robert nominations and a Zulu Award for best actor, and the family drama Until We Fall won him the best actor prize at Tallinn’s Black Nights festival in 2018, shared with Iran’s Navid Mohammadzadeh. Around the first of those films he described the Danish market with a pilot’s flat realism: he expected resistance, he said, because he had met it all his life, so he built a career that did not depend on Denmark alone. In 2022 he signed a production deal with Scanbox, and when Zaid returned in Darkland: The Return the following year, Salim was also an executive producer. That same spring Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant gave him the international showcase that two decades of supporting parts had not, as Ahmed, the interpreter whose loyalty the film is built around.

Then came Hercules Falling, the clearest picture yet of what he wants and what it costs. Christian Holten Bonke’s first feature cast Salim as Youssef, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq sent to an island facility to learn to control his rage. Before the film opened in November 2025, the production turned into a public quarrel. Bonke accused his lead of behaving as a kind of co-director on set and of continuously breaking him down psychologically. Salim answered that Bonke had not been up to the job of directing, an account several others from the set backed, according to the Danish news agency Ritzau. Both men brought in unions and lawyers, and the film reached cinemas crediting Salim as “co-director on set.” Critics mostly liked it; Berlingske gave it four stars out of six. The quarrel settled nothing about the larger question. An actor who takes over a troubled set may well save the film; he also gives the next first-time director a reason to think twice before hiring him.

The international offers, meanwhile, keep drawing from the same well. In 2024 he played Rami opposite Sidse Babett Knudsen in Gustav Möller’s prison thriller Sons, which competed at the Berlinale, and turned up for an episode of Ritchie’s The Gentlemen on Netflix. In August 2025 Prime Video released The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, with Salim as Major Mohammed “Mo” Farooq, an Iraqi special operations officer who becomes a CIA contractor. Mehdi Avaz’s Málaga-set Mango followed that November. His newest screen work is High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, TNT’s eight-episode limited series starring Joel Kinnaman as the CIA analyst John Nixon, in which Salim plays Samir; it premiered on 13 September 2026 and closed on 4 October.

Off screen Salim, who was born on 18 August 1977, has a son, born in 2011, from his relationship with the producer Meta Louise Foldager, and a daughter born in 2024 with his wife, Nanna, whom he married in August 2025.

No new lead role has been confirmed since the Saddam series wrapped its run. The next Danish film that puts Salim at the centre will say more about him than any American casting: whether the credit on Hercules Falling was a one-off rescue, or the first entry in a logbook that ends with his name alone above the title.

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Tags: actors, Guy Ritchie, game of thrones, Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim, Borgen

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