The role Rami Malek would only play on one condition: “I feel a substantial weight”
Cinemagoers would have seen Rami Malek in the Night at the Museum series and in a few regrettable projects like Battleship and the final Twilight movie, but it was his performance as Freddie Mercury that opened a lot of people’s eyes to his abilities.
Since winning his Oscar for playing the Queen frontman, Malek has appeared in major productions like The Amateur and Oppenheimer, as well as several acclaimed TV shows and theatrical productions. When it comes to prominent roles, however, it’s hard to argue against playing a Bond villain, and in 2021’s No Time to Die, he played Lyutsifer Safin, an evil scientist hell-bent on finishing off 007 once and for all.
Where the likes of Christopher Lee, Javier Bardem, and Sean Bean failed, he succeeded, with Safin’s nanotechnology becoming responsible for the superspy’s epic demise at the end of the film. That should probably have come with a spoiler warning, but come on, if you didn’t know that already, then where have you been?
Being involved in a James Bond movie in any capacity is an honour, but playing the villain of the piece is a real privilege. Malek should have jumped at the chance to join such an illustrious and historical list, but as he explained to the Daily Mirror, he had a few reservations about bringing Mr Safin to the big screen.
‘We cannot identify him with any act of terrorism reflecting an ideology or a religion,” he said, “That’s not something I would entertain, so if that is why I am your choice, then you can count me out. But that was clearly not his vision. So he’s a very different kind of terrorist. It’s another extremely clever script from the people who have figured out exactly what people want in those movies. But I feel a substantial weight on my shoulders. I mean, Bond is something that we all grow up with.”
Sadly, Malek was absolutely spot on to worry about his character. The Bond series has a long and nasty history of unfairly portraying non-white, non-English people, where Live and Let Die is full of outdated stereotypes about African-Americans and Caribbeans, and Octopussy’s Indian setting makes way for many uncomfortable moments. Malek, who was born in America to Egyptian parents, has spoken about being racially profiled in the past, hence clearly wanted to use his platform to avoid such a recurrence.
While Safin might not have spread any negative stereotypes, he was far from the most compelling, for in lieu of giving him a religious or racially motivated cause, the writers gave him no cause at all. He smacks of ‘evil for the sake of evil’, which just doesn’t hold up in Bond’s more complex, 21st-century era. The ‘heavily scarred foreign baddie’ trope is one that has served the franchise for decades, and despite his best efforts, Malek’s interpretation of Safin still falls under that category.
He might not have gotten the well-rounded, three-dimensional villain that he was hoping for, but at least he tried to use his voice for good; fingers crossed Denis Villeneuve does a better job when he takes over the reins of the series.
