Rami Malek / "Bohemian Rhapsody"

time in ten years. Really, Yeah, you didn't feel compelled to. I was just dressed up like Freddie again. I think there were a lot of Freddy's this year. There were a lot of Freddie, which means we're doing something right. Um, yeah, I didn't either. But you know, my kid dressed up as character called super Why. I don't know if you know super Why. It's on Netflix. You should get to know super Why. Something about teaching you how to read

as it's a superhero. I don't know. I barely watched, but he's all about it and that was his GUSTUMEA. So maybe Freddy Marcury next year he'll be three. I don't know. It could be interesting. It's not bad putting a mustache. That's it. Thank you, Danny, Thanks Dan, Thanks thanks again, man, I appreciate it. Good you, good luck with the photos. Get you lined up here. But yeah, dude, you've been You've been busy. I've been I've been busy. I've gone around the world for the first time in

three weeks, will be one around now. Let's let's just dive in. Uh we're here today with Robby mall like the star of Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury himself also obviously you know him from Mr Robot on TV, and he's been busy. I was gonna ask you if you have anything left to say at this point. I guess at this point I'm trying to come up with anecdotes that no one's ever heard. So if you ask very obscure questions, perhaps I can give you something. Crash. Yeah, where have

you been? Everywhere around the world? Yeah, I've been all through Europe, all around the world. Went from uh Sydney to Singapore, landed in London and went straight into interviews there and have just found my way back to Los Angeles via a few days in New York doing pressed there as well. Well, you know what has the world tour sort of revealed to you about Freddie Mercury and

his impact around the world in different places. Well, collectively, everyone has their own relationship with Queen, the music, and and the front man. He is revered by everyone from every single country that I've visited. And I think you know, when we set out to make this movie, Graham King and Dennis O'Sullivan who had the rights with with the legendary band members of Queen. Uh, they were taking it to studios and I don't know how many studios actually

knew just how relevant this band is globally across generationally. Um, the impact is massive. Everyone knows Queen, and everyone knows Freddie Mercury. Now it's time with this film to bring it to a brand new generation. Why do you think that would be lost on anyone? I mean, it is such a defining Like I feel like we all know when we first heard Queen. Yeah, I don't know. I think people just did not really anticipate just how massive they are globally. Places like I'm going to Japan on

November five. They were huge in Japan. Freddie loved Japan. He used to go over there and pick up all of uh the art that they had, all the kimonos he could find. He would come back with boxes a full of things he collected in Japan. Roger Taylor too, and they have a very heavy influence over there. South America another place they played in Rio to two hundred and fifty thousand people, the largest audience recorded to date.

That's a fact you'd find out in the film. Yeah. Well, uh, you know, when did you first kind of take the queen? When when did you first hear their music? I don't know that I realized that it was it was Wayne's world that brought it to my attention. Yes, is that exactly what it was? Same? Yeah, And that's when Bohemian Rhapsody hit the charts for again again number one. I'm hoping this film doesn't. Maybe I think that will be a really cool moment if Billboard has Bohemian Rhapsody at

number one. So I'm gonna put this out there and and let everybody know that that's my goal. Everybody go downloaded on iTunes. We'll also go see the movie, but downloads I can get to the song on the charts. Um, but I heard it, and uh, it was arresting to me. It was halting and haunting and at the same time uplifting and whimsical and ethereal. And as a young man, I thought, Wow, this is the power of what music can do, what what I think you know, types of

art can do. And uh, it inspired me. It invigorated me, and I wanted more. And around the same time he passed away, and that was the Did you see the big Wimbley concert, the where all the bands got together, the big remembering Freddie deal? Yeah, the tribute concert. There's probably very very limited amount of things that I would not be I've seen everything. If you guys have a chance, watch George Michael do his rendition of Somebody to Love. He was a massive fan of Freddie, Mercury and Queen

and he gives it his heart and soul. And if you watch, there's a documentary that takes you behind the scenes. You can see you can see David Bowie standing back and just watching George Michael and thinking, wait, am I going to have to follow this guy? That was a huge concert. I remember watching it when I was a kid. Guns and Roses did uh uh uh they did Bohemian Rhapsody and we will rock yard. I think, what did David Bowie do under pressure with Anie Lennox? That's exactly right,

you can ask me an. And it took Elton John and Axel Rose to hit both sides of the notes for Bohemian Rhapsody. That's how great Freddie's range walks absolutely well. Uh. In fact, just to go back to that, most of the people singing that they had to alter the songs to bring them down a key, yeah, because they just couldn't go as high. And if you think about um under pressure David Bowie, they went and made that song

on a whim, right. They happen to be in the same city recording different albums, and they found each other in one moment, crossing paths, and they came and they said, why don't we do a song together? And John Deacon comes in with this baseline, this iconic bassline that we know from Under Pressure now, which was also stolen by Vanilla Ice. Remember, according to Vanilla he added an extra beat, so it's not stolen, is that what he? Okay? But they left that day after that just to go get

a slice of pizza. And when they came back. John Deacon didn't. He didn't remember the bassline, and that song was almost lost until Roger Taylor came in and started drumming it out, and then uh they Freddie and David didn't want to hear each other put down their their track, so they went into separate rooms. But Freddie couldn't help me. He said, I got to top him. So whatever he does, I think that's some of the highest notes you'll ever

hear Freddie do in a song, and it is. It's for me, one of the most powerful queen songs, an amazing song. Is this part of the fun for you as an actor, to dig in this deep and investigate and become essentially like a journalist? Yeah, yeah, it was.

It was something I look forward to every night, whether I was on Mr. Robot or working on Papion, I would as soon as I got home, and after learning my lines for the next day of filming both projects, I would sit and watch all the archival footage and I was enamored with him and infatuated with Freddie, and then I started to fall in love with him, and I felt like a bit of a stalker because I just wanted more and more and more I was looking at, uh,

you know, people's camcorded a video from a concert in Japan in the eighties, and I just felt like, Uh, if there was something out there that was recorded of

this man, I wanted to see it. And then when I exhausted all the video footage, I would go to anything that was like what we were doing right now, a type of radio interview, because you could hear different sides of You could hear how he interacted with someone who was delivering him a tea or or vodka tonic, and how demure he could be, how his pitch would change when he was talking to someone he liked versus if he was ready to get out of an interview.

You could hear his voice drop a few registers. He's just fascinating. And when you hear people talk about him, how he just walked into a room and that was it. I mean, the air was sucked out and you could feel exactly who this person was, and he had power and gravitas, and you just wanted to know more. Well, he's such an iconic figure. Were you more nervous than excited, more excited than nervous, were nervous at all to take on something this gargantean. Yeah, I mean how could you

not be everyone everyone has heard a Queen song. I think if you haven't, you should and you have at your own relationship with this band and this in and um. You know, he struts on stage sometimes with a crown and a cape, and he might as well be a superhero, right. He's the closest we get to a Marvel character that is actually a human being. So that's how I had to, uh, just to begin to remove the weight of it is

think he's human. Um, he is a figure that there's got to be a way I can connect with besides this this deity, this rock god, this monolith on stage. And so I knew I could find his humanity and that would be my way in. And I started to think, here's a guy who's struggling with his identity. He's he's

a foreigner. I mean, if he if he doesn't go to this boarding school in India from where he was born in Zanzibar, if it's not a British boarding school, he ends up in London at eighteen for Rukable Sara with a very heavy good Garati slash Indian accent. You know, there are a few things that might have kept us

from from realizing the Freddie Mercury we now know. And so I looked at this guy that was an immigrant, a fish out of water, trying to discover his identity, and uh, you know, someone who was called Bucky as a kid and is also trying to discover his sexual identity in a time and place and with a religious family who very much stigmatized the idea of anything being other than atrasexual. I mean London in the seventies didn't didn't care too much for anyone identifying any other way.

So the fact that he has all this turmoil and frustration and struggle to understand him off but knows there is a power, a voice, a a charm and charisma that he wants to share. A defiant individual wants to share the real self, his real self with the world. He gets out there on that stage and he lets

it rip. And that's what I understood from, you know, being a young man who grew up in the city where and I'm staring at the four oh five right now where you know I live, grew up about you know, six miles down that way, and to think of being here talking about this film and everything that's happening with it. Tomorrow it's going to open, and I could tether myself

to that in a certain way, if that makes any sense. Uh. You know, with something like this, the trick is not slipping into an imitation, right, Like you really want to embody something real about the character and not just kind of mimic. Uh. I'm always curious when people play real characters, like what you discovered about the real individual that you really wanted to bake into your performance and make sure

that came across. You know. There were times when I was working on his accent, which is it's very posh sometimes, but then a few things might slip out of it that are come from his mom who or his dad

who have that Indian accent. And there were times before we'd even get on camera where I would work on just doing his mother's accent with my dialect coach, William Connacher, and we would then layer on this kind of posh RP British dialect and I would I would have him down sometimes and in front of the camera it wouldn't

always be as good as it was off camera. And I thought, well, that's fine at a certain point because I don't want to do a perfect impersonation or imitate you know him, It would have to be me, and I would I realized it's whatever emotion was happening for me on the day was affecting how the words were coming out, and so I thought, at the end of the day, that's good. That what that it's altered in a certain way. Um. Like I said, I watched all the footage, but I always wanted it to be mine

as much as it was his. I didn't want to lose myself and and people will say, well, he really did lose himself, but there's a lot of me underneath there. Um. One thing I didn't want was to be choreographed. I wanted to be spontaneous in any moment, and not just on stage. But uh, whenever I walked into a room, as Freddie walks in late quite often in this film, you know I was going to make an impression. And it's probably, you know, sometimes the loudest I've ever been

on camera. I usually prefer very quiet and nuanced performances, but I remember Tom Hollander at one point, the actor came up to me and are you always this loud? And I was taken aback for a second, but it's Freddie Mercury. There are moments when you have to be But it was this, It was spontane spontaneity that I always wanted, so uh, I felt it had to come from me and him. And one thing I really used as a guide more than anything was his lyrics. I would look at the songs and one day I wrote

them all out because I found them so informative. It was almost like a diary who was pouring himself his heart out. And you know, there are times when he talks about this, this profound loneliness or this this desire for love. I mean he has he has songs. You can see it in Somebody to Love? Can anybody find me somebody to love? He's got another song called Lily of the Valley. I am forever searching high and low. But why does everybody tell me? No, Neptune of the

seas and answer for me please? And so he has, you know, loneliness and these ethereal whimsical, uh, kind of fairytale notes of of what life should be. I mean, he's got songs called Ogre Battle and March of the Black Queen. And the guy is Uh, he's a poet. I mean he could have. I feel like, if he really wanted to, he could have been a short story writer. But that's where I learned the most about him. I could ask Brian made so much. I could ask Um

Roger Taylor so much. Jim Beach Miami Beach, who is now the executor of his estate. He was is the band's lawyer. I could ask Cash Uh, Freddie's sister a lot. But the diary, the songs themselves were gave me the most insight into who he was. Where when you first started to do this work, where you uh was it easy to to try to find the character or did you struggle at all? And was there a specific thing that really unlocked it for you that you came across. Oh,

that's a good question. There were moments throughout where I struggled. I mean I remember one time I was working with I was working with Paul Bennett, who was the movement coach, my movement coach on this. She ended up doing the choreography for all of us at Live Aid and through the performances. And I was working on Mr Robot in New York and trying to on my weekends work solely on Freddie Mercury. So I got Fox to fly her

out from London. And there were moments when I was just so exhausted from that third season and Mr robot we I remember one time I said, Paul, I'm going to just grab a snack downstairs, and I came back with thirty minutes later with an apple, and I could just tell that my mind was it had been exhausted and overtaken by too much. It was just too overwhelming, and that was wasn't just from having worked on robots, trying to encapsulate this human being that is sometimes just superhuman,

and it was daunting. Yeah, there were moments where I looked at myself and I said, what have you done? What have you done? And this will be impossible, And everybody, I think, just could see that it was coming. It was gradual. It was a slow burn, but things were evolving day to day, and I just had to hang in there and know that there was still time and and I was going to put this together at some point. I just had to keep reminding myself, you can do this.

This is something that you've aspired to do your whole life. It's a it's a daunting challenge, but you got into this business because you like challenges, and and he has a story to tell that I think is perfect for this generation and who is really trying to identify who they are and not be not be labeled or criticized for being exactly the the authentic people that they want to be. Yeah. I can't imagine having gone back and forth between Robot and that character and then Freddie Mercury.

I mean, there's such completely different dispositions headspaces. Obviously, it's just I guess that plays into the exhaustion, right, Yeah, Well, I mean I will say this. I mean people can say that they are extremely different people, but there is that that profound loneliness and sometimes alienation that they both have. I mean, Freddie could be in front of a hundred thousand people and go home just to a hotel room. And I've heard him talk about that from going from

hotel to hotel. And you see that in the movie as well. When when there's a situation with the band you broaches ais, aren't you guys tired of all of this album tour, album tour, being on on the on the road all this time, no no real sense of family, um and uh, I think they're they're elements was Elliott and Mr Robot. Now there is also one costume and Mr Robot that I get to wear and about a hundred in Bohemian Rhapsodies, so that was a very different element.

The last day of shooting on Mr Robot on season three, I was in the last scene and everybody knew that. Two weeks later I was going to be on the stage performing live aid. That was on day one and Sam s Mayle, who writes, directs and created Mr. Robots a dear friend of mine. He says, all right, give me a little, give me a little Freddie before you leave. And I did a spin for the entire crew and kicked up my my legs and gave him I see later,

Darling with the British dialect, and everybody laughed. There not seen that out of the Kid in the Hoodie for about three year four years. Now by the end of it, where you, uh, do you feel like you finally felt at peace with what you were doing and did you feel like it was something you could have kept doing, like where you relieved that it was contained to this movie or is it like, oh, I could do this

for a mini series. I would like to because there's such a density of information that you've come across here and that you're trying to put into this. It seems like it could be a longer story. Yeah, there was. Graham King was approached by numerous people to turn this

into a mini series. And what what I think is so special about this movie as you get to see these misfits that have no reason of being together this band, and it's a coming of age story, especially to see Freddie who he is as a young man evolved in collectively write these songs together and then piece them together. And some of the best moments in this film are those serial crowd concert scenes that just make you feel

as if you're sitting in the first three rows. And I don't think you could do that quite as well as on on a smaller format. But to your point, yes, I would love to drag this on kind of the way Johnny Johnny Depth took this into four iterations of Pirates of the Caravan. I don't know how many may on the way maybe, but yes, there is so much of a story to tell. We had a finite period

of time. There are so many elements I wish we could tell in about Freddie Mercury, but ultimately, um, this is it's a two hour film that takes place from seventy two about. To be quite honest, some of the best biopics I think do do uh just um are are take place in in a finite period of time. I think capodis just around a few years if I'm correct. But of course he was. He was one of those characters Freddie Mercury that I didn't want to immediately dismiss

as soon as we ended. In fact, we had to do a few pickup shots, and I mean I was chomping at the bit to get to a few months later. When we got I got to be Freddie again. Well, I do not wish to dwell on the director situation. That's been well reported, but I'm curious about how it affected you and how difficult was it for you to keep the character in focus amid whatever disarray may have

been caused on the set. Well, it was at one point I think it just it all raised my game in a way because there were moments I just told myself, you know, things are changing, and what you can do right now is depend on yourself, push yourself to to excel even further and take on the responsibility of not only honoring him Freddie and doing him justice, but making sure that you know, everyone around me was was not going to fall into some type of chaos or or

or melt down. I think I just had to pick myself up by bootstraps and and continue doing my job as diligently as I thought I had been. And when you know, if you think about me and Mr Robot and the first season, I had multiple directors, and I knew Elliott. I knew exactly what I was gonna do from day one to U to the very end of

that first season, and I had identified that before I started. Now, it's always helpful to have a director guide you to some degree, but with with this particular character, I had about it at least a year of preparation. So um, I I wasn't completely jarred by the whole thing. I actually got a little bit of rest right before, right before DECKX came on, and Dexter was just this incredible

infusion of energy. He's he's an actor, so he was UM came from a perspective where he could watch all the footage and he knew exactly where we were going

and what I was doing. We had Tom Siegel, who I don't think has got enough love that he's He is an incredible DP, and I thought, if we lose our DP, then we're going to have a problem, because he had just a cohesive vision for how he wanted to go from you know, some handheld stuff early on to a very polished look towards the end, and you know, ultimately,

I think it's fairly seamless. Well, was that whole thing something you chalk up to, you know, creative tensions or do you feel that there was an onset environment you want to avoid going forward? Like what did you take

ultimately from that situation? I think ultimately, I just I know that I have to be as prepared as humanly possible and but still be able to get go out there and perform spontaneously, and that that anything can happen on a set as it can in life, and you know, I just just compose yourself and try to be the best leader you can be on set. I think, just just be as as elegant and dignified and graceful as

you can. And collectively, you know, we had we had an incredible cast that from day one supported me to the nth degree, and we all reads each other's games. I think you go in there you never know what you're going to expect, but if you come in with the right attitude, you can overcome any obstacle. And I guess along similar lines, I've heard that you want to be a director yourself. You've got material you're interested in directing.

So I'm also curious what you learned from this whole situation that you know what not to do, what to do as a director. UM. I'll talk this up to Sam s Mel who I is someone that I've spent you know, five years with now we're about to do the last season and Mr Robot and we have this

brotherly relationship where we collaborate so intensely. And I think, as a director, what what I would do is, you know, really trust you know the actors that I'm that I've chosen to work with, and know how to delegate everyone's job on set. I mean, you pick the right art director, you picked the right costume designer and cinematographer, costume design or makeup artist. I said costume to Undertwin, It's important

on this movie, really is important on this movie. Um, and obviously you collaborate, but everyone has their job to do, and um, you know, you really have to come in prepared but allow for conversations to exist and know that everyone has the intention of really putting their best foot forward. And that's that's what I would do. I'd come in and lead, but allow everyone to do their job. Yeah, well, I'm sorry all of that happened. I do think that

your performances outstanding. And you know, even amongst those there there those who don't like the film, everyone still spotlights you so probably on the on the performance. Thank you so much. Man. I can't wait for people to see it. I think it's it's got something for everyone. It is, it's it'll get you exhilarated. It's so it's so exciting to see how these songs were made, who these guys were before they came to be one of the most

legendary bands in rock history. Uh. It has a sense of family, but the the evolution of of so many things that queen is. Um. I think that they are revolutionaries. They defied stereotype and convention and they did things that were ahead of their time. And I think Freddie Mercury is a revolutionary spirit who was ahead of his time. He'll make you laugh and he'll make you cry, and ultimately I think it's a very uplifting film and hope help people go and check it out. You got more

Mr Robot coming? What else? What else is up next for you? I think I'm gonna take a little bit. Yeah, well everyone check out the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. It opens tomorrow. And uh, Rommy May thank you for coming on the show. Real appreciate it. So happened to be with you. So I happen to a thank you very very much, had it