Rami Malek

• 1. Introduction

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  Rami Malek watched a single concert video, the Live Aid performance of 1985, at least 1,500 times before he played Freddie Mercury. He did it on YouTube, while preparing for a role he would later call precious beyond anything else in his career. The habit says a lot about how this American actor works. He builds a character from obsessive research, one small detail at a time. Yet for years almost nobody was asking him to build anything at all. This documentary follows Malek from a childhood in the San Fernando Valley to the top prizes in film and television. Along the way it asks what he did while the work would not come, and what it costs to disappear so completely into someone else.

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• 2. A Name Mispronounced

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  Rami Said Malek was born in Torrance, California, on the 12th of May 1981, the child of Egyptian immigrants Nelly Abdel-Malek and Said Malek. The family had left Cairo three years earlier, in 1978, bringing an older daughter with them. His father Said, a travel agent and tour guide, had grown infatuated with the Western visitors he met. They settled in Sherman Oaks, and Rami grew up mostly in the San Fernando Valley. His mother Nelly worked as an accountant.

  Hollywood sat close by but felt out of reach. Malek later said he grew up beside it without realizing, and thought it a million miles away when it was only a ten-minute drive.

  Home life ran on Egyptian traditions. The family belonged to the Coptic Orthodox Christian church, and Malek spoke Egyptian Arabic until he was four. His father would wake him in the middle of the night to talk by phone with relatives in Samalut. Malek has an identical twin brother, Sami, who is younger by four minutes, and an older sister, Jasmine, who became an ER doctor. He has also said he is one-eighth Greek.

  Fitting in was harder. As a first-generation American, Malek spent most of his childhood hearing his name mispronounced. It took until high school before he found the confidence to say, "No, my name is Rami." That silence made it hard to build a sense of self, so he poured his energy into creating characters and doing voices.

  At Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, his classmates included the actress Rachel Bilson, and Kirsten Dunst shared a musical theater class with him. His parents hoped he would become a lawyer, so he joined the debate team as a freshman. He struggled to build arguments. His debate teacher noticed a gift for dramatic interpretation and sent him to a competition with a scene from Charles Fuller's play Zooman and The Sign. Onstage, he felt something special pass between himself and his father in the audience. It was the first time he had seen his father become emotional, and his parents' warm reaction freed him to chase acting. His brother joined him in the school's drama department, and after graduating in 1999 Malek headed for Indiana.

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• 3. Years Of Waiting

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  The University of Evansville ran a theater program that Malek remembered as formidable, and it uncovered a work ethic he did not know he had. He spent a semester abroad at Harlaxton College in Lincolnshire, England. The summer before his senior year, he interned at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where he became acquainted with the playwright August Wilson. He completed his BFA in 2003, and the university gave him a Young Alumnus Award in 2017.

  Graduation brought mounting college debt. Malek had hoped to attend graduate school for theater. Instead he moved to New York and shared a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side with friends from the theater world. Several of them, writers and directors among them, formed the Slant Theatre Project and staged their own plays around the city.

  A visit home to Los Angeles changed his plans. There he met the casting director Mali Finn, who persuaded him to stay and look for work in Hollywood. He moved back in with his parents and paid his way by delivering pizzas and making falafel and shawarma sandwiches at a Hollywood restaurant. Sending out his resume produced little. Depression followed, along with a loss of confidence, and he considered getting a real estate license instead.

  After about a year and a half, the casting director Mara Casey finally called. She asked to speak to his agent, and he admitted he had none. She told him to get one first. The conversation had gone so pleasantly that Malek suggested they meet anyway, and she agreed. That meeting led to his first role, in a Gilmore Girls episode that first aired in January 2004.

  Work began to accumulate. In 2004 he starred in Johnny Boy at the 130-seat Falcon Theatre in Burbank, then in Shoes opposite Kelli Giddish with the Slant Theatre Project. He also supplied uncredited extra voices for the video game Halo 2. In 2005 two episodes of Steven Bochco's war drama Over There earned him his Screen Actors Guild card. He then appeared in an episode of Medium and won the recurring role of Kenny on the Fox comedy The War at Home. Kenny's coming out story drew praise from GLAAD.

  In 2006 came his feature film debut, as Pharaoh Ahkmenrah in Night at the Museum. He repeated the role in sequels in 2009 and 2014. In the spring of 2007 he returned to the stage in Keith Bunin's The Credeaux Canvas, playing Jamie at the Elephant Theatre in Los Angeles.

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• 4. Acceptable Terrorists

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  In 2010 Malek returned to television as Marcos Al-Zacar, a suicide bomber, in a recurring role on the eighth season of the Fox series 24. He was growing weary of playing what he called acceptable terrorists. He told his agent to reject any part that painted Arabs or Middle Easterners in a bad light.

  Later that year he earned critical acclaim as Corporal Merrill "Snafu" Shelton in The Pacific, the Emmy-winning HBO World War II miniseries. Executive producer Tom Hanks wrote him a letter praising the performance during filming. Hanks then cast him as the college student Steve Dibiasi in the feature film Larry Crowne, released in July 2011.

  The intensity of The Pacific took a toll. Malek recalled "some pretty intense mental anguish during and after filming" because he could not separate himself from Snafu. He left Hollywood for a time and lived briefly in Argentina, though he says it did not work and he has since found better ways of coping. The most valuable lesson, he said, was learning to distance himself from his characters. Without it, he could not have taken on complex roles later in his career.

  Supporting parts in major films followed. In August 2010 it was announced that he would play Benjamin, a vampire from an "Egyptian coven", in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2. In 2013 he played Nate, a new employee at a group home for young people, in the indie film Short Term 12 opposite Brie Larson. He also worked twice with Spike Lee, first in the 2012 remake of the South Korean film Oldboy, where his part was trimmed significantly, and later in the crowdfunded Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. The two men have stayed friends. Smaller parts came in Battleship, the Oscar-nominated The Master and Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

  Video games offered another outlet. Until Dawn, a horror game released for the PlayStation 4 on the 25th of August 2015, cast him as Josh, one of its main characters. Malek lent the character his voice and likeness, and he was fully motion-captured for the role.

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• 5. Elliot Alderson

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  Sam Esmail had auditioned more than 100 actors for the lead of a series he was developing, and none of them fit. The character was Elliot Alderson, a mentally unstable computer hacker. Esmail was ready to rewrite him entirely until he watched Malek audition in the late summer of 2014. He said the audition opened his eyes to who Elliot really was.

  The resulting psychological drama, Mr. Robot, premiered on the 24th of June 2015 on the USA Network. To play a man with mental and social disorders, Malek met with a psychologist. Critics responded at once. USA Today called the work his breakout performance. Entertainment Weekly named his magnetic performance the best reason to watch the show. Backstage said he anchored the drama and offered a spin on the anti-hero that promised a fresh direction for prestige television.

  Prizes followed. Malek collected nominations for the Dorian, Satellite, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, and he won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series. He also won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He was the first non-white actor to win that Emmy since 1998. The show ended in December 2019 after four seasons, and the fourth earned him a third Golden Globe nomination.

  Film leads came next. Malek was among 3000 actors considered to play Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story. His first starring film role was Buster's Mal Heart, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2016. He played a man living two lives, one as Jonah and the other as Buster. Director Sarah Adina Smith had cast him before Mr. Robot took off, and she said she had no idea how huge and adored he would become. John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that fans of the series would not be disappointed.

  In 2017 Malek joined the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman for its fourth season, voicing Flip McVicker, a writer who does not trust email. He also played Louis Dega opposite Charlie Hunnam in Papillon, a remake of the 1973 film. It premiered at the 2017 Toronto festival and reached a limited release in August 2018, about two months before the London premiere of his next film.

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• 6. Becoming Freddie Mercury

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  For Bohemian Rhapsody, Malek relocated to London and built a team around himself. He worked with a dialect coach and took piano and singing lessons. Each day he spent four hours studying videos of Mercury with his movement coach, Polly Bennett. He also had to learn to speak and sing around a set of false teeth designed to copy Mercury's overbite.

  Brian May, Queen's guitarist, often attended filming. He said Malek's performance was so accurate that "we sometimes forgot he was Rami".

  The film premiered in London on the 23rd of October 2018. It grossed over $900 million worldwide on a production budget of about $50 million. That made it the sixth highest-grossing film of 2018 and the highest-grossing musical biographical film of all time. Reviews of the film overall were mixed, but critics acclaimed Malek. He won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA, and the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2019.

  Malek considers Mercury the most important role of his career. "This is a role I don't think can be outdone," he said. He believes there is more for him to do, but doubts that anything will match how precious the role and the man have been in his life.

  The Oscar carried a milestone. Malek became the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win Best Actor. Egyptian media and some government officials celebrated. Member of Parliament Mohamed Ismail did not, calling Malek a bad example and saying the award aimed to corrupt morality in the Arab world. Human Rights Watch answered that Egypt deserved an Oscar for hypocrisy, since it prohibits celebrating LGBT people in its media.

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• 7. Process And Image

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  Malek describes his preparation as beginning with panic. Then comes research, which builds a world around the character. He looks for music the person would listen to and imagines memories for them until he has to perform as them. His most creative hours are mornings and evenings. He likes to try experimental takes until one works. Sam Esmail noted that Malek is often dissatisfied even when the director thinks a take is perfect. Because of that shared insistence, Esmail calls him a "co-creator".

  His body is part of the process. Malek lost significant weight to play Elliot Alderson, Freddie Mercury and Snafu Shelton. For Snafu, Tom Hanks required him to hold between six and eight percent body fat.

  Before Mr. Robot, Malek was known as a character actor. He treated auditions as a "proving ground to test things out" and prepared as though he would actually perform. He created so many characters that he wished he could collect them as a package to show people. After Mr. Robot he came to be regarded as an unconventional leading man. The comedian Pete Davidson plays him in Saturday Night Live sketches that parody the character. In 2017 Malek accepted an invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one of 774 new members invited after criticism of the 88th Academy Awards for a lack of diversity.

  His face has drawn as much comment as his acting. After the audition for The Pacific, Tom Hanks told the producer, "This guy's got haunting eyes". GQ Middle East called his look vampiric. After the 2016 Toronto festival, The Globe and Mail described "thousand-mile eyes".

  Fashion followed. Malek appeared in Dior Homme's Spring 2017 campaign alongside Boy George and A$AP Rocky, and he was the face of Saint Laurent's Spring/Summer 2020 campaign. GQ Middle East launched in October 2018 with him on its first cover. GQ placed him at number 29 on its Best Dressed Men list for 2019, and his stylist is Ilaria Urbinati. The Hollywood Reporter put him on its Next Gen 2015 list, and Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019.

  Off screen, Malek is reserved in interviews and avoids social media. The New York Times called him extremely reluctant to dish about himself. He insists he is the opposite of the introverted Elliot, saying he is exuberant and loves meeting strangers and hearing their stories.

  He has supported the ACLU and the Epidermolysis Bullosa Medical Research Foundation. In September 2018, inspired by playing Mercury, he began working with the (RED) organization as an ambassador against HIV/AIDS. He traveled to Eswatini to learn about the state of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa.

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• 8. After The Oscar

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  In December 2018 it was announced that Malek would produce and star in Blackout, an eight-episode podcast written by Scott Conroy. It is a thriller about a small-town radio DJ who must protect his family and community after a coordinated attack destroys the power grid. Two episodes debuted on the 19th of March 2019, with six more arriving weekly. Malek voiced the DJ, Simon Itani. The podcast won the 2020 Webby Award for Best Scripted Podcast (Fiction).

  Film work continued at pace. Malek voiced Chee-Chee the gorilla in Dolittle, starring Robert Downey Jr., which was produced in 2018 and released in January 2020. On the 25th of April 2019 he was cast as the main villain, Lyutsifer Safin, in the James Bond film No Time to Die. Principal photography began that April and wrapped in October. The release planned for April 2020 slipped to October 2021 because of COVID-19 delays, and to support it Malek hosted Saturday Night Live that month.

  In May 2019 he joined the crime thriller The Little Things, opposite Denzel Washington and Jared Leto. It reached audiences on the 29th of January 2021. He was also part of the all-star ensemble in David O. Russell's Amsterdam, produced in early 2021 and released in October 2022.

  In December 2021 came word that he would join Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer as the physicist David L. Hill. The film was released on the 21st of July 2023. In 2025 he starred in the thriller The Amateur, and as the U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley in the historical drama Nuremberg. That year he also took the title role in Oedipus at The Old Vic, which ran from the 21st of January to the 29th of March 2025.

  In 2026 he starred in Ira Sachs's The Man I Love, playing Jimmy George, a gay actor facing AIDS in the late 1980s. Critics acclaimed the performance.

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