It's been one of the most tumultuous castings in recent years, but there's been a lot of interesting reasons as to why Freddie Mercury has been so difficult to nail down.
The original choice was supposed to be Ben Whishaw, who exited the role due to scheduling conflicts. Next came Sacha Baron Cohen, who gave a frank account of his problems with the script in a recent enough interview and more or less explained why the whole thing seem doomed to fail in his mind (and ours, in fairness.)
The cliff notes is that someone from what's left of Queen - Cohen wouldn't say who, but you can guess - wanted the film to not just be about Freddie Mercury, but about how the band soldiered on without him without and eventually recruited a guy from American Idol! to replace him.
In fact, the script that Cohen saw and was working off had Mercury die right back smack in the middle of it.
Anyway, that might have all changed as it's also been confirmed that Bryan Singer of The Usual Suspects and X-Men franchise will be directing the film - which is titled Bohemian Rhapsody - from a most recent draft written by Andrew McCarten, who wrote the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory Of Everything.
So, thoughts? Well, Singer's a good director and he hasn't done a biopic before - unless you count Valkyrie and we don't - so it'll be curious to see how he works it. Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury is an interesting one, to say the least.
Malek's a fantastic actor and you only need to look at Mr. Robot to get that, but playing Mercury? One of the greatest stage performers in music history? It's a stretch, to say the least.
How he's going to work in the disparate accents that Mercury had - he was born in Zanzibar, lived in India and was educated and brought up in England - is one thing, but none of Malek's previous performances suggest he's got that sort of physical presence to play him.
Who knows, we could be pleasantly surprised in a couple of years when we eventually get to see it. Also, why are they choosing Bohemian Rhapsody for the title of the film? A Night At The Opera could have been a great shout for the title.
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