Rami Malek, who’s rumored to be in the running for an Oscar nomination for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, revealed he’s still researching the Queen icon’s history, even though he completed the job months ago.

The movie stands a good chance of becoming the biggest-grossing music biopic of all time, with receipts well more than $100 million in the U.S. and a take approaching $300 million worldwide. It’s also given Queen their highest album chart placing in 38 years and fueled a third appearance in the singles chart for the title track.

“You see [Mercury] onstage and then almost instinctually I’d want to discover more,” Malek told Who in a new interview, saying he’d read letters the singer had written from boarding school as a boy. “There’s just an eloquence and elegance to him that you see when he’s on stage, and then you can [see] where all that was birthed from.”

He noted that "not many artists are wearing an entire head-to-toe leather outfit, sipping a champagne flute and telling their audience to strip naked if they please. And he still comes off with this essence of royalty.”

Producer Graham King recalled that, on their first meeting, he and Malek spent four or five hours just talking about Mercury. “I don’t stop," Malek noted. "I re-read one of the biographies the other day just to see, ‘Did I miss anything?”

Admitting he wished “we could delve deeper” into Mercury’s relationships with men, he added, “I just kept pushing for more of that aspect of his life. I don’t know if we ever felt fulfilled by it.”

 

 

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