A kind of magic to play Freddie
Rami Malek had a fight or flight moment when he was asked to play the iconic Queen frontman in a long-delayed movie. He chose to fight. Stephanie Bunbury reports.
There will never be anyone quite like Freddie Mercury, the unbottled genie who strutted, bounced and roared at the front of rock group Queen from 1970 until he died of Aids-related bronchopneumonia in 1991.
Playing him in a biopic, especially one as illstarred as Bohemian Rhapsody, was always going to be close to impossible.
‘‘It’s an extraordinary, iconic human being who is a one-off, which would be seen by any reasonable human being as a daunting task,’’ agrees Rami Malek. ‘‘I guess essentially it begins with: ‘Do I or don’t I?’ There is that fight or flight moment. I chose to fight.’’
Malek was filming a remake of Papillon with Charlie Hunnam in 2016 when he heard the producers of Bohemian Rhapsody were once again looking for their Freddie.
Already, the film had been years in the coming. Back in 2010, Sacha Baron Cohen was locked in to play the role. But after he left in a storm of ‘‘artistic differences’’ with surviving band members Brian May and Roger Taylor, Ben Whishaw became top choice for the band and the director, Dexter Fletcher.
In 2014, Fletcher left; Whishaw said there were issues with Peter Morgan’s script and it was ‘‘on the back burner’’ before he also faded from view. At that time, it’s probably safe to say an EgyptianAmerican actor called Rami Malek hadn’t sprung to anyone’s mind.
Two years later, however, Malek was nominated for numerous awards, winning several, for his work in the TV series Mr Robot. The character he played was hardly a calling card for the ebullient and elaborately costumed Mercury, but the real Malek resembled him in a couple of crucial ways.
Like Farrokh Bulsara, whose Parsee family went to Britain from Zanzibar, Malek came from a faraway minority culture. ‘‘That, in a sense, was my way in,’’ he says. Also like Farrokh he was ferociously determined.
He made a tape of himself as Freddie in his full performing pomp and sent it to the producers in London. At that stage, Bohemian Rhapsody had been on the table for more than six years.
He made pre-recordings at Abbey Road that could be mingled with the originals; meanwhile, knowing Mercury had four extra back teeth that pushed his front teeth forward, he persuaded the makeup artist on Papillon to make him a false set that would sit over his own.
‘‘I just had to get the ball rolling by getting myself to London, flying myself out, to let them know how passionate I was.’’
He didn’t want a choreographer. Nothing Queen did was choreographed. Instead, he found a movement coach and studied filmed interviews and concerts to ingest his body language.
The light finally turned green for Bohemian
Rhapsody in November 2016 when Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects and originator and director of four of the X-Men films, came on board. Malek was confirmed in the role.
There was also a completely revised script by
The Theory of Everything writer, New Zealander Anthony McCarten and, crucially for a musical biopic, they had the songs. Killer Queen, Another One Bites the Dust, I Want to Break Free: Queen
songs played all day on the set.
‘‘It’s almost like having an immediate score for the film as you’re doing it,’’ remembers Malek. ‘‘The music is timeless. One thing I thought before we started was that we needed to make a film that would live up to it.’’
‘‘I just had to get the ball rolling by getting myself to London to let them know how passionate I was.’’ Rami Malek
It is hard to overstate Queen’s rock’n’roll hugeness. Guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor were students in a band called Smile; Taylor ran a second-hand clothes stall in Kensington Market with Freddie Bulsara.
They joined forces in 1970 and settled on the name Queen; bass player John Deacon joined in early 1971. Two years later, they started recording; by 1974 they hit the top 10.
Then came 1975 and the smash hit that changed radio programming, pop videos and all conventional wisdom about what rock fans wanted: Bohemian Rhapsody, a six-minute song spanning several musical genres that was No 1 in England for nine weeks.
In 1976, a Queen concert in Hyde Park broke attendance records; in 1985, they stole the show at Live Aid and broke the world attendance record again at a festival in Brazil, playing to 300,000 people. Gold and platinum records plastered their walls; in 2006, an exhaustive assessment of the industry established that Queen’s Greatest Hits was Britain’s best-selling album of all time. One in three British households has a copy: they are, indeed, the champions.
Freddie lived life to the full, and this aspect was apparently one of the many sticking points during
Bohemian Rhapsody’s tortuous progress to production. Baron Cohen said he dropped out of the film because the band wanted to sanitise Freddie Mercury to fit a PG version of the rock-star lifestyle.
‘‘The guy was wild. He was living an extreme lifestyle. There are stories of little people with plates of cocaine on their heads walking around a party,’’ said Baron Cohen.
May’s response was pithy. Baron Cohen, he said, was ‘‘an a...’’ who was ‘‘telling untruths’’.
It is true, however, that May was actively involved in every aspect of production. Lucy Boynton, who plays Mary, Mercury’s wife in his uncertain youth and lifelong best friend, says May was on set every day.
‘‘Which was really nice and really reassuring,’’ she says, ‘‘because I always get slightly nervous about biopics, not wanting to become intrusive in any way.
‘‘People are asking: did we explore the darker sides of Freddie’s life in this film? The film doesn’t shy away from anything, but it’s done in a really beautiful, respectful way.’’
So while we see wrecked lounge rooms full of vodka bottles and there is a glimpse of a dwarf in a party scene, there is no visible cocaine and barely a whiff of gay sex.
With director, cast and an almost familyfriendly script in place, Bohemian Rhapsody’s troubles were not over. Since 1997, director Singer had been dogged by accusations of serious sexual abuse; he also had a reputation for unannounced disappearances and friction with actors.
Once shooting began, he soon clashed with the perfectionist Malek, throwing a plate at him during one argument. When he repeatedly failed to show up on set, Malek formally complained about his lack of professionalism.
In the first week of December last year, Singer was sacked. His replacement was Fletcher, who had left three years before. ‘‘It was difficult,’’ says Boynton. ‘‘But I think you become closer and work harder when things get difficult.’’
Malek concentrated on channelling Mercury. Malek has the sense the young Farrokh Bulsara was shy, even timid.
‘‘I think Freddie was very aware of being unlike the people around him,’’ he says. ‘‘There is the sense that Queen was catapulted to fame but, learning about him, you see the drive he had to get to where he was.
‘‘He taught himself to play the piano. He didn’t have any vocal instruction, yet he could sing those four octaves. He is constantly pushing himself to defy any expectation of who he was. It became easier when he found that that bravado was not just a facade, but something he had in him.’’
That defiant sense of mission is certainly there in Malek’s exact re-creation of Mercury’s showstopping turn at Live Aid in 1985, which is the climax and grand finale of the film. ‘‘We wanted to get as close to the on-the-day performance as possible,’’ says Malek. Freddie knew then that he was HIV-positive; every song is a triumphant blowback against death.