UNDER PRESSURE
As Rami Malek takes the stage, a wiry bundle of energy and expectation, his short hair, tight white jeans, and studded leather cuff help him look every bit the part of a gay man in the 1980s. But this isn’t any man (and if it were 30 years later, we’d probably be using the word bi or pansexual, not gay, to describe him). The scene recreates Freddie Mercury’s performance during the now-famous Queen set at the charity concert Live Aid, which has been called one of the greatest rock shows in history.The 1985 performance (re)introduced Queen to nearly 2 billion viewers in 150 countries, according to CNN—the largest TV audience ever. My friends and I were teenagers then, gathered around a tiny kitchen TV in rural Idaho watching the Live Aid telecast on MTV.
And now, watching Malek take the stage, preening and pumping, emoting, and singing out to the audience for their legendary call backs, I get the same chills. Many viewers do. That’s because Rami Malek isn’t playing Freddie Mercury; he’s absolutely channeling the long-dead singer. Even Mercury’s Queen bandmates sometimes got lost in the performance on set.
The music (an amalgamation of Mercury, Malek, and Canadian singer Marc Martel) and the clothes (including the mastery of the V-neck onesie) are spot-on. But what sells you on Malek as Mercury is his bombastic peacocking—that thrusting leg, the grandiloquent poses, the fist pumps—all the mannerisms that turn Malek into Mercury, a character he so embodies in the new film Bohemian Rhapsody, that at times you forget he’s not Mercury.
Malek, the Emmy-winning star of USA’s hit thriller Mr. Robot, absolutely inhabits the role of rock’s greatest front man, but his preparation began well before he even got the part.
“Before the
