Malik, Rami – Moving near Grantham led to string of Golden Globes for actor

Rami Said Malek (b1981)

Rami Malek is an American actor best known in the UK for his portrayal of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), for which he won the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and British Academy Film Award for Best Actor.

He has received many other accolades, and is the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Time magazine named Malek one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019.

Rami was born in Torrance, California, the son of Egyptian immigrant parents Nelly Abdel-Malek and Said Malek. His parents and older sister left Cairo in 1978 after his father, a travel agent and tour guide, became intrigued with Western visitors.

 They settled in Sherman Oaks, mostly staying in the San Fernando Valley. As a child, Malek rarely ventured into Hollywood, saying “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in LA, but somehow, I had no idea that I lived right next to Hollywood… I truly thought that that was a million miles away, and it’s just a 10-minute drive

His father sold insurance and was a travel agent, while his mother worked as an accountant.

 Malek was raised in his family’s Coptic Orthodox Christian faith, and spoke Egyptian Arabic at home until the age of four. He has an identical twin brother named Sami, who is younger by four minutes and later became an ESL and English teacher. His older sister, Yasmine, is an ER doctor.

His parents emphasized to their children the importance of preserving their Egyptian roots, and his father would wake him up in the middle of the night to talk on the phone to his Arabic-speaking extended family in Samalut.

Malek attended Notre Dame High School, where he was in the same class as actress Rachel Bilson.He is a year older than actress Kirsten Dunst, who also attended the school and shared a musical theatre class with him.

After graduating in 1999,[Malek went on to study theatre at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. He also spent a semester abroad in England, where he studied at Harlaxton College near Grantham.

 During the summer before his senior year, he interned at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where he became an acquaintance of playwright August Wilson. Of his decision to attend the University of Evansville theatre program, he said, “The level of talent at the University of Evansville was formidable from faculty to fellow actors. There’s a commitment and dedication that the theatre program required that unearthed a work ethic I didn’t know I had.”

He completed his BFA in 2003. The college later honoured him with a 2017 Young Alumnus Award, given to those who have “achieved personal success and contribute services to their community and to UE”.

After his college graduation, Malek wanted to attend grad school for theatre; with college debt growing, he moved to New York, where he shared a one-bedroom Lower East Side apartment with friends who were also in the theatre community.

His network of friends included writers and directors, many of whom would come together to form the Slant Theatre Project, and they would perform their own plays around the city. While visiting his family in Los Angeles, Malek met casting director Mali Finn, who convinced him to stay and look for work in Hollywood

After moving back in with his parents, he took jobs delivering pizzas and making falafel and shawarma sandwiches at a restaurant in Hollywood to make ends meet. Despite sending his resume to production houses, he found it difficult to get work as an actor, which led to bouts of depression and a loss of confidence. He considered getting a real estate license instead of pursuing an acting career.

In 2006, Malek made his feature film debut as Pharaoh Ahkmenrah in the comedy Night at the Museum. He reprised this role in the sequels Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014).[9] In the spring of 2007, he appeared on-stage as Jamie in the Vitality Productions theatrical presentation of Keith Bunin’s The Credeaux Canvas at the Elephant Theatre in Los Angeles.

Malek returned to television in 2010 in a recurring role as the suicide bomber Marcos Al-Zacar on the eighth season of the Fox series 24. Growing weary of playing characters he called “acceptable terrorists”, he instructed his agent to reject any role that painted Arabs or Middle Easterners in a “bad light”.

Malek securede supporting roles in a series of major films. In August 2010, it was announced that he had been cast as the “Egyptian coven” vampire, Benjamin, in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.

In 2013 he played Nate, a new employee at a group home for youths, in the indie film Short Term 12, opposite Brie Larson. He appeared in two Spike Lee films during this period, the 2012 remake of the South Korean film Oldboy, in a part that was trimmed significantly, and later in the crowdfunded picture Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. The two men have remained friends. He also had minor roles in Battleship, the Oscar-nominated The Master, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. He appeared as Josh, one of the main characters in Until Dawn, a horror game released for the PlayStation 4 on August 25, 2015. He lent his voice and likeness to the character and was fully motion-captured for the game.

In 2018, Malek portrayed Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. The film premiered in London on October 23, 2018, and became a major box office success, grossing over $900 million worldwide on a production budget of about $50 million.

 It became the sixth highest-grossing film of 2018 worldwide, and the highest-grossing musical biographical film of all-time. Though the film received mixed reviews overall, Malek’s performance was acclaimed by critics. He won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the film.

 In preparation for the role as Mercury, Malek moved to London where he worked with a dialect coach and a movement coach, and took piano and singing lessons. For four hours each day, he studied videos of Mercury with his movement coach, Polly Bennett. This included watching the 1985 Live Aid concert video on YouTube at least 1,500 times to perfect his performance for the filmHe also had to get used to speaking and singing with a set of false teeth that mimicked Mercury’s overbite.

Brian May, Queen’s guitarist who often attended filming, is quoted as saying that Malek’s performance was so accurate that “we sometimes forgot he was Rami”. Malek considers his role as Mercury the most important of his career, saying: “This is a role I don’t think can be outdone. I think we’re always searching for that next great role, and I guess I’m fortunate that I’ve already been met with it. I’d like to think that there is more out there for me to do, and there is, but I do doubt that there is anything that lives up to how precious this role and this human being have been in my life.[

Over time, Malek’s prominence in the industry has grown. In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter included him on Next Gen 2015, its annual list of stars who are 35 and under and “on the rise”.[128] Time magazine named Malek one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019 under the category of Artists.

Malek tends to be reserved in interviews, having mentioned in one of them his desire to stay “anonymous” abroad. He avoids social media. The New York Times called him “extremely reluctant to dish about himselfHe says he is the opposite of the introverted character of Elliot that he plays in Mr. Robot, saying, “I’m an exuberant person. I thrive on affection. I like chit chat … One of the great things about living in New York is that you meet so many strangers, and I love encounters with strangers; I love meeting people and hearing their stories”.

Malek has been nominated for and won several major industry awards. For his work on Mr. Robot, he has been nominated for three Golden Globes, an Emmy, two Satellite Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, among others, winning an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2016. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, a Golden Globe for the Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.

He is the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. While his win was celebrated in Egypt by the media and some government officials, Member of Parliament Mohamed Ismail criticized Malek’s win: “I was surprised by the Egyptian media’s celebration of Rami Malek, because the role played by Rami Malek in the film is far from his real character. He is trying to [spread] homosexuality among the youth… The award has a specific goal, which is to corrupt morality in the Arab world. Rami Malek is a bad example. If he was in Egypt, he would have been hanged”.

 The organization Human Rights Watch stated that the country deserved an Oscar for hypocrisy for praising Malek, given its prohibition on LGBT people being celebrated in the media.