Rami Malek, Gwilym Lee and Joseph Mazzello brought the magic of Queen to Boston on Monday night.
Prior to joining area college students for a Q&A session following a special screening of Bohemian Rhapsody at the AMC Loews Boston Common, the actors got a chance to rock out on the red carpet as a professional marching band played Queen classics like Fat Bottomed Girls and We Are the Champions. When it comes to the latter tune, Rami Malek and company were torn when asked whether the track was tailor made for the Hub, since this is the city of champions, after all.
“It’s definitely a big sporting event chant,” Rami Malek coyly remarked. “I don’t think Queen even knew how big it would be in the States as a crowd pleaser at every sporting event.”
“I’m from New York, those 27 World Series might say something different,” said Mazzello. “‘We Are the Champions,’ what a song. I loved it even more learning to play it.”
Lee, who hails from across the pond, seemed to agree with that the song is a perfect anthem for Boston, “City of champions? Yeah, I’ll take that.”
Rami Malek talks Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie Mercury
During the festivities, Rami Malek also spoke with Metro about their experiences working on the highly-anticipated new biopic.
“You see how bold and audacious he could be, but there’s such a generous, warm side of him as well, a very sensitive side,” Malek said of portraying frontman Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. “I think the movie portrays that very well. You get to see him peacocking on stage and this very liberated side of him. But at the same time, you see someone who is quite inhibited at points in his life and trying to discover himself.”
Malek, whose parents immigrated from Egypt, could relate to Mercury’s story on a very personal level, as the late performer was of Parsi descent and lived in Zanzibar and India before relocating to England as a teen. While the Mr. Robot star didn’t know about Mercury’s heritage going into the project, once he found out, Malek wanted to make sure that they highlighted the singer’s immigrant background.
“That was something that I wanted us to focus on early on in the early incarnations of what this film would be,” says Malek. “I thought it was one of the most important things for us to portray in the film. I think we need to send that message to everybody, which it sounds ridiculous, but pure equality and humanity and that we all can exist without labels or categories or be boxed into any one thing. No one did that better than Freddie Mercury. He said, ‘I exist in any way I want to, and you can too.'”
“I look to him as someone who was a revolutionary, refused to be stereotyped,” he adds. “He defied every convention and that is something I can only aspire to do in my own work and my life.”
