Rami Malek was fired and rehired from his first movie: “I had to fight my way back”
He’s won an Oscar, starred in billion-dollar movies, and actually managed to kill James Bond, so you could say Rami Malek really has done it all.
The Egyptian-American star has built up a stellar catalogue of films and TV shows across a 20+ year career, so let’s look at how he got to the pedestal of acclaim on which he is today.
It all started with the 2006 family comedy, Night at the Museum, starring Ben Stiller as a museum security guard, which imagines what would happen if all the exhibits came to life when nobody was watching; think Toy Story, but with US presidents instead of cowboys. Malek plays the Egyptian pharaoh Ahkmenrah, a vital character to the movie, as it is the magic of his golden tablet that allows the displays to walk the museum halls at night.
Malek remembered this breakthrough moment in a conversation with Paper; he had done some TV work prior to this point, appearing in an episode of Gilmore Girls in 2004, but this was the first time he had tasted success on the big screen. While he now looks back at the film as the one that gave him his big break, at the time, it was almost an opportunity he almost let slip through his fingers.
“I was fired from [Night at the Museum] because I had watched too much Pirates of the Caribbean and I asked for eyeliner,” he revealed, adding, “I said, he’s going to be a British dandy, and he’s going to come out swinging… They were expecting the stereotypical scary mummy. And I just tried to fly against that. And, yeah, I had to fight my way back into that with the help of Ben Stiller actually having my back.”
Night at the Museum was released in 2006, three years after the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and Malek was clearly looking to emulate Johnny Depp’s turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, a flamboyant, foppish subversion of a conventional archetype.
While this didn’t end up happening, he seems to have made some sort of compromise with the people in charge, as Ahkmenrah isn’t your typical horror movie mummy in the vein of Boris Karloff, with even a joke where he went from speaking in grunts to learning English during his time on display at Cambridge University.
Luckily for our hero, this outburst of creativity didn’t ruin his career, as he would go on to appear in the film’s two sequels, including Battle of the Smithsonian, a film Roger Ebert absolutely hated. He quickly built a resume of other high-profile releases, including the Tom Hanks vehicle Larry Crowne and the absolutely god-awful Battleship, so it wouldn’t take long before he was an established name in Hollywood, all thanks to his initial performance as the ancient Egyptian king.
Fortunately, Malek’s idea to play Ahkmenrah like Jack Sparrow was shot down, which definitely would have been too much and dated the film immensely. His actual performance as a regal, poised monarch was much better suited to the part; maybe they can take the dandy approach for the planned reboot of the series and see how it plays out.
