How Rami Malek became Freddie Mercury

This story was supposed to start differently, but Rami Malek stole my line.

After spending over an hour chatting with him at the Fox Studios in Los Angeles, I had to wonder why he was so nervous at the beginning of the interview. He was tense, hugged, crossed and uncrossed his legs, scratched his arms, and had been jerky at a dreadful frequency suggesting an advanced agitation or large amounts of caffeine. What was it all about?

Malek replied that his nervous energy was at the height of the course, which has already led some to ask: "Is Rami OK?"

"I have my frills," he continued, then gave me a sly smile. "Rami Malek could not stand still," he said, in an overly stentorian voice. The reply would not have been the best way to get into this story, but it would have, especially since he was extremely reluctant to talk about himself during our conversation.

Attempts have been made. Malek, who was bred Coptic and went to Catholic school, was he still religious? "It's such a personal problem," he deflected. How does it decompress during the production of Mr Robot, in which he plays the paranoid protagonist Elliot Alderson? "It's so personal!" Exclaims Malek, only revealing that it was happening in his own way.

Finally, he offered a scintilla of self-disclosure. Malek's predilection for privacy had been greatly strengthened, he said, with his interpretation of the role of Freddie Mercury, leader of the rock band Queen, bruised from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991, and played in Bohemian Rhapsody, which will be released in the UAE on November 9th. "It's nice to be able to keep your privacy, a bit of anonymity," Malek said. "It's Freddie's thing."

Freddie Mercury, private? On the stage, he was a rooster on the promenade, casting a majestic voice. Outside the stage he was a cheeky Dionysian.

But while studying the singer, Malek concluded that Freddie, as he calls it, mastered perfectly the art of verbal parry, never giving more information than he wished, regardless of the interviewer.

"What you see in the moment is what you get," Malek said. "It's up to him to decide."

Bohemian Rhapsody appears on the screen after a decade of crises, with a lot of infighting and a rotating cast of key players. The first Sacha Baron Cohen was about to play, but nothing was shot. Cohen then said he gave up after the group tried to seduce Mercury's hedonism, prompting Queen's lead guitarist Brian May to call it [expletive]. It was learned that Ben Whishaw was on board, but it did not last either.

The script was written by a prestigious writer (Peter Morgan, The queen, frost / nixon), rewritten by another (Anthony McCarten, The theory of everything, Darkest hour) and painstakingly reworked.

"That's why it took so long to bring the film to life," said Graham King, one of the film's producers. Dexter Fletcher was hired to lead and then left the project. Bryan Singer took over from his post until his dismissal late last year, while he only had a few weeks left of filming, so as not to be presented on the tray. (Singer said that he had to take care of one of his parents, who was sick.) Malek and he had also quarreled from time to time, which Malek did not know – "There were artistic differences," he said – and this king laughed when asked.

"You make a film at this level, there is always tension," King said. Fletcher ended up doing the final stage of production but, according to the rules of the Directors Guild of America, he will not be credited.

The reaction to the first trailers of the film has ensured that the drama that surrounds it will not die anytime soon. Glimpses of Malek's sinuous incarnation in Mercury, superimposed on the singer's rising voice, left some fans in tears, while others feared that Mercury's madness – it was closed – might have been "washed to perfection." ".

"It's nothing we do not fix," Malek said. "It's another thing that makes the quality of our film. I do not think it's a form of exploitation or salace. "

Be that as it may, the film will allow plenty of anticipation, and Malek will have to deal with his problems before embarking on the role.

Of course, the game involved a huge risk; bad biopics invite a particularly gleeful type of schadenfreude. "I'm not convinced that it could go wrong, that it could hurt someone's career if it did not go right," Malek said. But it was an opportunity that the actors dream about. He knew that he had to catch it and give it all.

And to do that, he had to make new teeth.

Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara into a parish family in Zanzibar and attended a boarding school in India. His comrades have dubbed him Bucky; he had four extra teeth in the upper back, which pushed his anterior teeth into an extreme overbite and, according to him, gave an additional resonance to his voice.

To embrace Mercury's physical appearance, Malek asked a costume designer to create a set of Freddie's teeth in a small black plastic container. He jumped in his mouth to train every night. He also flew to London and persuaded King to pay for a dialect tutor and a movement coach who asked him to study the inspirations inspired by Mercury: Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin and Liza Minnelli. Cabaret.

"It was almost sometimes more useful to watch Liza than to look at Freddie himself," he said. "You have found the inspiration and birth of these movements."

All this happened even before the film went green. Malek wanted to be prepared if the film was an essay, which would prove to be a wise move. The first scene was a reenactment of Queen's appearance at Live Aid in 1985, considered one of the best rock performances in history. For singing, Malek's voice was mixed with that of Mercury and that of Canadian singer Marc Martel. "No one wants to hear me sing," Malek said. But he had to do it loudly in front of the cast and the team for each scene.

The shooting of Live Aid at the beginning of the slam-slunk-dunked cast members into their roles. Malek's performance particularly astonished members of the Mercury group, who felt that the actor was not content to describe Mercury, but lived in it. "We sometimes forgot that he was Rummy," guitarist May writes in an e-mail.

Watching the movie, I sometimes forgot too, and I was among the nostalgic and the misty eyes of the scenes of Malek on the stage. I also found myself asking him to make a leg of force, a pose or something else from Freddie, something I had never wanted to ask an actor before. Of course, I should not have been surprised when he opposed it.

Malek said that he had never been so devoted to this role. But, he said, "I can not be Freddie at the command for the rest of my life, right?"

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Do not miss

Bohemian Rhapsody released in the UAE on November 9th.

WHO WAS FREDDIE MERCURE?

Born in 1946 in Farrokh Bulsara in a parsian family of Indian origin living on the spice island of Zanzibar, East Africa, and educated in a boarding school at 39. In India, Mercury arrived in London when her family fled the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

Bohemian Rhapsody follows Mercury's rise to fame and complicates the love life, from the Queen's formation in 1970 (after which he changed his name to Mercury) to the group's stellar performance at Live Aid Concert.

Their 20-minute set at Wembley Stadium – across from the Wembley Arena – was the group's best time, often cited as one of the greatest live performances of all time.

The legend of Mercury only grows with time, but it must still be overshadowed by a more captivating stadium spectator. Even during his lifetime, Mercury was stunned that no one wrote it to go beyond it We are the champions.

But 41 years later, his solo anthem of 1977 remains the inevitable agreement of the sports finals. Bohemian Rhapsody is still regularly voted the greatest rock song ever written.

– AFP