“A bit of a battle”: the traumatising role that put Rami Malek through “absolute hell” for years
Ever been sitting watching an old film and spotted an actor and thought, ‘Wait, that can’t be him, he’s not old enough to have been in that?’ Well, that happened to me the other day, watching the first Night at the Museum, when I spotted Rami Malek as a long-dead Egyptian prince brought back to life.
Now, we can argue all we like about whether or not a movie that’s 20 years old can qualify as ‘old’, but it surprised me nonetheless, because I thought that Malek’s career had essentially begun with Mr Robot in 2015, some nine years after the Ben Stiller comedy’s release.
That’s obviously not the case, as a cursory look at Malek’s CV shows he actually did plenty before that much-acclaimed TV series about hackers co-starring Christian Slater, which ran for four seasons and won Malek an Emmy, although he did suffer for his art to get it.
“It was a lot of mental gymnastics day in and day out,” he recalled. “And I’m not going to lie, the schedule and [creator] Sam Esmail put me through absolute hell.” That was no doubt due to the rigours of how complex a character Malek’s Elliot Alderson was, the anti-social computer engineer who moonlighted as a cyber hacker trying to bring down the heads of American corporations.
Malek would endure seven-day filming schedules and long hours, with Esmail keen to make the conditions on set as intense as possible, plus he had to recreate the character’s morphine addiction, leading to him snorting crushed Vitamin B pills countless times a day.
Season three of the show also featured an episode shot to appear as one unbroken take, meaning Malek had to remember countless directions and movements to avoid having to reshoot. However, he recounts the experience as one he’s pleased with, adding, “It was a challenge that I embraced and look back on with great pride. I mean, I would remember going through Monday to Friday, and by Friday, I feel like I would look at my body and felt I had gone through… a bit of a battle.”
It was surely worth it for the acclaim Mr Robot received from critics and audiences, and it certainly didn’t do Malek’s career any harm. Before the show had even ended, he was cast as Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which brought in $900m at the box office and won him the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ in 2019.
There’s since been a lot of debate about whether that film was any good or not (it wasn’t) and whether he should have won the award for that role (probably not), but it served as a jumping-off point for Malek playing a Bond villain in 2021’s No Time to Die, and that is undeniably very cool indeed. He also played a supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s multi-award-winning nuclear epic Oppenheimer two years later.
Now there’s already award noise about Malek’s next movie, titled The Man I Love, although it won’t hit cinemas until later in 2026. Set in New York in the 1980s, it’s a musical fantasy about an actor facing a life-threatening diagnosis from AIDS as he seeks one last defining role.
