I’ve paid my dues time after time. I’ve done my sentence but committed no crime. And bad mistakes, I’ve made a few. I’ve had my share of sand kicked in my face but I’ve come through. And I need to go on and on, and on, and on…
We are the champions, my friends. And we’ll keep on fighting till the end. We are the champions, we are the champions. No time for losers ’cause we are the champions…………… of the world!
Not my words of course, but those of the late Freddie Mercury. But if Brian May’s high-praise for the actor who recently portrayed Mercury, Rami Malek, turns out to be justified then he’ll likely be saying the exact same words on the Academy Awards stage.
That’s right, Queen guitarist Brian May thinks Malek deserves all of the awards for his performance in biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
The film, which was released in the UK on October 24, took £6.48m in its opening weekend, knocking Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born off the top spot at the box office. The reviews weren’t perfect but that doesn’t faze May.
He told PA:
He’s incredible… without doubt he’ll be on the nominations list for an Oscar and well deserved as well. He inhabited Freddie to the point where we even started to think of him as Freddie. Really remarkable.
We’ve lived with this project for nine years and it’s incredible to see it doing so well.
It came out to s***ty reviews, as some of our work has before, but the public has embraced it magnificently. Everybody gave 200%, from the actors and technicians to the production team and hair and make up, everyone.
Praising Gwilym Lee who portrays himself in the film, May added:
You don’t get any lukewarm responses. The guy who plays me should be getting awards all over.
Malek himself said of that role that he ‘instinctually [wanted] to discover more’ about Mercury as he prepared for the gig.
He explained:
There’s just an eloquence and elegance to him that you can see when he’s on stage and then you can see where all that was birthed from. I mean, not many artists are wearing an entire head-to-toe leather outfit, sipping a champagne flute and telling their audience to strip naked if they please. And he still comes off with this essence of royalty.
Just earlier this year, Mercury was found to be the greatest singer of all time.
A group of Austrian, Czech, and Swedish researchers conducted research, which was published in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology.
While they didn’t confirm the urban myth that Mercury’s range spanned four full octaves, they did uncover some spellbinding facts about the singer’s voice.
First off, despite being known mainly as a tenor, he was actually closer to a baritone. The team of researchers based this off six interviews he did which revealed a median speaking fundamental frequency of 117.3Hz.
That, on top of ‘anecdotal evidence which Mercury once turned down an opera duet because he was afraid fans wouldn’t recognise his baritone voice’, was good enough proof the singer was talented enough to split away from his base range.
No time for losers.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk
