"It's noon in London, 7am in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for Live Aid. Wembley welcomes their royal highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales …”
So began, on July 13, 1985, Live Aid, the “global jukebox” organised by Bob Geldof to raise money and awareness for the Ethiopian famine.
And so begins — and ends — Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-in-the-making biopic of Freddie Mercury. Because, as anyone with a passing knowledge of British music history knows, Charles ’n’ Di weren’t the only royalty rocking Wembley Stadium that day.
Live Aid was the day that Queen emphatically made good on their promise to rock you, in a legendary set that propelled them from very big band to even bigger global phenomenon.
It’s also the moment in the band’s 48-year (and counting) career with which the producers chose to finish the film. Yes, even though Bohemian Rhapsody is Mercury’s life story and he lived for another six years before dying of an Aids-related illness in 1991.
“I didn’t know how to continue that story,” says Graham King. The Oscar-winning Hollywood producer is a Cockfosters native, long resident in Los Angeles, who has steered Bohemian Rhapsody to the screen. It only took eight years.
“I didn’t want to show Freddie dying,” he continues, bullishly. “We don’t hide from it, or from HIV, or from him being gay. But we’re making an entertaining, uplifting theatrical film. I want kids who were bullied in school, or confused about their sexuality, to go and be inspired, because Freddie was bullied. Can you imagine that look of his in school?”
Queen were the Seventies band who were too grandiose and too brilliant to fail. A decades-straddling, hit-making, stadium-filling phenomenon, their flamboyant, wildly talented frontman is a gift to any dramatist. So a biopic of their rise and Freddie’s fall should have been route-one, big-screen narrative gold.
And yet the production of Bohemian Rhapsody proved almost as tortuous as Mercury’s struggles with his sexuality in an unforgivably hostile climate.
“I felt like there was a magnifying glass on everything I was doing from day one,” admits Rami Malek, who plays Mercury, when I meet him, King and Lucy Boynton, who — plays Mercury’s one-time love Mary Austin, — in the Soho Hotel. The Emmy-winning American star of Amazon’s Mr Robot portrays the singer magnificently. Yet after Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Whishaw, he’s the third lead actor attached to the film.
“I’d never worked this hard in my life,” he says. “It was all hands on deck with everything I could possibly do: singing lessons, piano lessons, movement choreography, every night watching documentaries or clips or performance footage of Freddie and Queen, to the extent that I feel like I‘ve exhausted everything on the internet.”
The Bohemian Rhapsody saga began in 2010 with writer Peter Morgan (The Crown, The Queen) calling King and telling him he was working on a script about Mercury. The producer then met Brian May and Roger Taylor, the two surviving and active members of Queen, “and they entrusted their life rights to me”.
Baron Cohen was “announced” as playing Mercury but King insists that was an overstatement.
“We didn’t have a finished script, so for me it wasn’t about who was playing Freddie. Leo DiCaprio brought me Aviator — he wanted to play Howard Hughes — so that was a done thing. This wasn’t that.
“Sacha wanted to play Freddie, there was no question about it. But we weren’t close to casting. It got so manic and crazy and in the press … And it became this war between Sacha and Brian.”
The story went that Baron Cohen wanted a rounded, adult-oriented movie — one that didn’t stint on the more drug-fuelled and debauched aspects of Mercury’s life — whereas May wanted a more inclusive, all-ages story.
“My concern over this whole mess was the thought of Brian May calling me and saying: ‘You know what, I’ve changed my mind, we don’t want to make the movie any more’,” says King.
But cooler heads (eventually) prevailed, even as another actor — Whishaw — reportedly followed Baron Cohen out of the door. Three rumoured directors (Tom Hooper, David Fincher, Dexter Fletcher) also all came and went.
Last September production finally began, based on a script assembled from multiple writers’ contributions. Malek was Mercury, Bryan Singer (X-Men) was the director, Queen were happy. But even then there were challenges for the actors.
“It was difficult because I had been told from the beginning that Mary is an incredibly private person,” recalls Boynton. The Anglo-American actress wasn’t able to meet Austin, to whom Mercury left much of his estate, “so there was a guilt attached: I don’t want to claim that I understand how she felt during these huge moments in her life.
“So we made this decision to go down a different route. Rather than match her look for look, costume for costume, as they did with the band, we made more of the character of Mary. So hopefully the audience can latch on to that rather than the real person, and hopefully spare her any re-entry into the spotlight which she never really wanted.”
They were thrown into the deep end, too: the first scenes shot were Live Aid. Gwilym Lee, the Guildhall-trained actor who plays May, tells me over the phone about the first time the guitarist came face-to-face with his movie self.
“Brian came to my trailer and we had this surreal, emotional moment where he was looking at himself through the
mirror of time. He was quite moved, I think. But then he almost immediately went into adjusting my wig. It was an amazing insight into his attention to detail.”
Boynton also found herself discombobulated. “The entire Live Aid backstage had been built, so you absolutely are there. Then you go up onstage and realise you’re looking out onto a field of cows in an airfield outside London,” she says of Bovingdon in Hertfordshire. “It wasn’t quite Wembley Stadium!”
There was one more speed-bump: 16 days before filming was to finish Singer left the set. The affable Malek doesn’t wholly refute rumours of clashes between leading man and director.
“We had … discussions about every aspect of the film. Absolutely there were different interpretations of moments … But I will say this: some of the best scenes in the film were born out of moments of friction,” he grins. “And that’s as far as I’ll go with that.”
“Unfortunately, Bryan had a lot of personal s*** going on his life,” adds King. “You could tell by his energy and his distraction… He wanted to close down production for a couple for months while he got his life sorted out. I’m sympathetic to that. But I want to finish the movie.”
So Dexter Fletcher, ironically enough, came back on board to push filming over the finish line last December.
It is, then, a credit to all concerned that Bohemian Rhapsody is triumphant entertainment. The post-production special effects have done their job: the Live Aid scenes are convincingly epic. The actors have done their job, too, notably Malek, who oozes pure Mercury.
“Freddie’s greatest ambition in life was to love and be loved, and that permeates every part of his story,” says the actor. “That’s the relationship he had with life, and with human beings. And that’s the way he treated everyone that came to see his shows.”
In that regard, he’d be thrilled with Bohemian Rhapsody.
Bohemian Rhapsody is released in cinemas this week
