Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
NOW THAT’S A KIND OF MAGIC
David Wigg was a great friend of Freddie Mercury for 16 years. Here he reveals how a blockbuster new film about Queen has captured all its frontman’s swagger and vulnerability
‘I’m a peach, but once I’m betrayed I’m an ogre’
It’s been eight years in the making, but now Bohemian Rhapsody – the story of Queen and Freddie Mercury’s meteoric rise to global superstardom – is about to hit the big screen.
Writer DAVID WIGG was a personal friend of Freddie’s for 16 years. As such he’s followed the progress of the film from the beginning and believes it will be well worth the wait. The trailer has had 11 million hits on YouTube, hardly surprising given that Queen’s 1981 Greatest Hits album is the biggest-selling of all time in the UK and one in three British families has a copy.
The project has not been without its challenges, though. It’s had three leading men and led to a spat between Brian May, the Queen guitarist and co-producer of the film, and Ali G creator Sacha Baron Cohen, who was originally cast as Freddie. When he left in 2013, Baron Cohen said the producers were more concerned about the band’s legacy than portraying the warts-and-all truth, prompting May to hit back. ‘Sacha became an a***,’ he said.
Ben Whishaw, best known as Q in the recent Bond films, then came and went, and finally two years ago US actor Rami Malek, who won an Emmy for his role as a tortured cyberhacker in TV thriller Mr Robot, took over.
Here David tells how it feels to see Freddie brought back to life, and reveals his memories of their times together…
Settling into my seat at the cinema a few months ago I saw parts of my life flash before me. For two mesmerising minutes I sat spellbound – along with the rest of the packed auditorium – as the trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody lit up the screen, and my great friend Freddie Mercury exploded back into life.
The film tells the story of the most flamboyant frontman rock music’s ever seen, and the tortured private life that turned him into a virtual recluse. It features the foot-stomping anthems that stole the show at Live Aid, the drink and drug-fuelled parties, the bitter disputes, the heart-rending affair with the only woman he ever loved, and the tragedy that shook the world. I knew Freddie well throughout much of this period and I can say that Rami Malek, who plays him, has captured brilliantly the mercurial combination of swagger and vulnerability that made Freddie who he was.
And mercurial he certainly was. I knew Freddie for 16 years, and our first meeting gave me a glimpse of how temperamental he could be. He came storming into his dressing room after a concert in Manchester where I was waiting to interview him, picked up a clothes iron and hurled it at a full-length mirror, smashing it to pieces. Well, I thought, he’s obviously not superstitious!
His outburst had been sparked by a faulty microphone, and although the audience were unaware anything was wrong, Freddie blew his top. When he’d calmed down, I asked if it was worth getting so wound up over a problem the public knew nothing about. ‘Some people can take second
best, but I can’t,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got the taste for being number one, then number two isn’t good enough. I’m spoilt! If anything goes wrong, it’s no good bottling it up until tomorrow. So we shout at each other and break a few chairs to get it out of our system. Tonight my mic kept going off, it’s like someone pricking you with a pin all the time – irritating.’
Despite his anger, Freddie and I instantly hit it off and I enjoyed interviewing him on many occasions in the US, Ibiza, Munich, Paris and London. Although he was famous for the way he dominated a stage with all the force of a hurricane, off stage I found he was entirely different. All the flamboyance was replaced by a man who was overtly shy and suspicious of people he didn’t know, a man who guarded his privacy with tenacity. He feared people might be disappointed that he was not the larger-than-life character they saw on stage and felt trapped by his own image. ‘I don’t want to shatter the illusion that’s been created on stage,’ he explained to me once. ‘I had to choose between shutting myself away to keep everyone guessing or trying to be myself. I’m a sort of chameleon – I change. I think it’s a combination of a lot of characters that make up a person anyway. I have moods. I’m a person of extremes.’
Freddie, whose parents were Parsi Indians, came to England at 17 after the family fled the revolution in Zanzibar where his father was working in the British Colonial office. He studied art and sold clothes at Kensington Market while trying to forge a career in music. As the film will show, Freddie first met Brian May when he went to watch his and Roger Taylor’s band Smile. After their lead singer left, Freddie joined them and the legend was born. It was he who came up with the name Queen – when he wanted it, Freddie always got