Rami Malek almost turned the down his role in Ira Sach’s The Man I Love, as a gay, singing performance artist in 1980s New York at the height of the AIDS crisis, because he worried he’d be accused of self-plagiarizing his Oscar-winning role as Freddie Mercury in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
“At first when I read [Sachs’s] script I said, ‘No, I can’t do this. There’s too many similarities. It could be problematic,” Malek said Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival press conference for the film, which received a 7-minute standing ovation at its world premiere Wednesday night and is now being talked about as a potential winner of the Palme d’Or.
“There’s a certain sense of fear,” he continued, “and I started to really think about what I was afraid of. Was it the similarities? Was it the singing? Was it obviously what was going on in the period?… And I knew I had to address the fear. If there’s anything Freddie taught me, it was ‘Address the fear.’”
Malek is already getting Oscars buzz for his performance as Jimmy, an enigmatic and magnetic performance artist preparing for what he knows may be his last time onstage.
Malek said he soon realized Jimmy and Freddie weren’t nearly as similar as they appeared on paper. Freddie Mercury was an icon, and Jimmy, his character in Sachs’s film, was a talented but struggling artist doing a downtown experimental theater recreation of a French movie nobody’s heard about, in what he knows may be his last time onstage.
