![]() Mercury formed Queen with Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, and EMI Records in the U.K. ![]() I don’t recommend it for anyone.”įreddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on Septemin Zanzibar, and grew up there as well as in India before moving to England in his late teenage years. I just had to be really cognizant of when to work out and when to crash diet. I bulked up for that first week and immediately had to drop muscle and weight and go into shooting young Freddie, who is very scrawny. But at the same time, I was on a very specific diet. There were days when I found myself laying on my back trying to just absorb as much air as possible. “Well, it’s highly impossible to do that. “I didn’t really want to bulk up, per se - I just wanted to get my body into a place where I could do a 22-minute concert over and over for five days and not be out of breath,” he explained. To truly become Mercury, he had to add muscle, but mainly he needed to be in prime condition to do a concert set with the same energy Mercury exhibited some 33 years ago.Īlso Read: Why Do the Golden Globes Think 'A Star Is Born' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Are Dramas, Not Musicals? ![]() ![]() Robot,” the 37-year-old actor is thin - frail, even - and he shuffles through scenes unassumingly. Shooting that performance, which actually became the final sequence in “Bohemian Rhapsody”, also required Malek to change his physique. He said, ‘If it’s planned, then it’s boring.'” We spent copious hours trying to figure out all the moves–and you know Freddie is a spontaneous human being in every aspect of his life. “ was the first thing we shot,” Malek said as he sat, relaxed, in a wooden chair, dressed in a black leather jacket, white t-shirt and navy creepers. With the help of movement coach Polly Bennett, Malek committed Mercury’s moves to memory for the film’s shot-by-shot re-creation. “But you know, I just put my nose down and gave it my all.”Īnd he started with Live Aid, the 1985 charity concert that included a Queen set that has since been dubbed one of the greatest live performances of all time. Robot,’ of all things, that I could play Freddie Mercury is beyond me,” he said. “Where the producers got the idea from ‘Mr. Malek wasn’t a dancer or singer, and he’d never played piano before taking the job in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Instead, he was an actor best known for playing a depressed hacker on an oddball USA Network series. On a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, between stacks of colorful album covers by the Beatles, Elvis Presley, David Bowie and many more, Rami Malek demonstrated the moves that helped him bring legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury back to life in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Assuming Mercury’s iconic stance, thrusting his arm forward into that familiar full-power fist pump and then segueing into a stomping tap dance that he likened to “squashing worms on the pavement,” Malek proved that even in a cramped record-store aisle, he had those iconic Mercury moves down. Mercury responded with a cutting little jab of his own: “I called him Simon Ferocious or something, and he didn’t like it at all,” the singer said in an 80s-era interview.This story first appeared in Actors/Directors/Screenwriters issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine. “You’re Freddie Mercury, aren’t you? You’re bringing ballet to the masses,” he sneered, according to May Vicious was referring to a previous quote Mercury had given in the press. Per an old interview with Brian May, Vicious made the first remark. Draw whatever symbolism you like about two bands on opposing ends of a shifting genre working under the same roof, but this much was simple: Vicious wasn’t a fan. Queen was working on News of the World, while the Pistols were working on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. It was 1977, and Queen and the Sex Pistols, the burgeoning faces of punk rock, were all under one roof at Wessex Sound Studios in North London. Freddie Mercury wasn’t notorious for feuding with other artists, but he did make an exception for Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious.
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