Rami Malek wanted Daniel Craig’s body. Turns out he didn’t need it

No one is expecting me to play an action hero,” says Rami Malek. It’s a fair point. The 43-year-old American actor, who won an Oscar for playing Queen’s Freddie Mercury in the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, is clearly capable of transforming himself. But singing We Will Rock You through a set of prosthetic teeth is one thing; taking down the bad guys in the violently balletic style of Jason Bourne or John Wick is quite another.

To put it bluntly, Malek just doesn’t look very tough. Standing 1.71metres in his socks, he has nice skin and a slender frame that occasionally seems drowned by the designer suits he wears on the red carpet. And then there’s his face. The interplay between his protuberant eyes and curiously feminine mouth is fascinating to watch, particularly when he’s playing an oddball like Elliott Alderson, the computer hacker in Mr. Robot, the series that brought him to international attention.

But let’s be honest: Malek looks like the kind of guy who’d be better at Wordle than Wing Chun.

None of this is news to the man himself. If he had any illusions about putting himself in the running to play an action hero by hiring a personal trainer and getting shredded, they were dispelled by a conversation he had with Daniel Craig on the set of the 2021 James Bond film No Time To Die. Malek, who was playing the movie’s villain, Lyutsifer Safin, asked Craig how long it took him to get a 007 body.

Rami Malek said it took Daniel Craig “an entire year to get into that shape. I thought, ‘forget about it’.”Credit: Samir Hussein/WireImage

“Daniel’s answer wasn’t what I was looking for,” he sighs. “He said the first one [Craig played Bond a total of five times] took about three months. By the time the last one came around it took him an entire year to get into that shape. I thought, ‘forget about it’. I’ll stay the way I am.”

And that might have been that. But winning an Oscar gives an actor extraordinary leverage. When 20th Century Fox – the studio behind Bohemian Rhapsody – called Malek and asked him what he wanted to do next, he told them he wanted to make an action movie.

“I think they were quite perplexed by my response,” he says in his vowel-stretching Californian accent. “I said ‘I need it to be elegant, smart, sophisticated and disrupt the traditional tropes’.”

Rami Malek won an Oscar, among other awards, for his turn as rock icon Freddie Mercury. Credit: 20th Century Fox

The result is The Amateur, a film based on a 1981 thriller by American author Robert Littell. Malek plays Charlie Heller, a mild-mannered CIA cryptologist whose life comes crashing down when his wife (played by Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by terrorists in London. Determined to avenge her, Heller demands to be trained as a field agent – a killer.

But his bosses’ scepticism – “I don’t think you could beat a 90-year-old nun in an arm-wrestling match” – proves well-founded. Charlie is hopeless with weapons, useless with his fists. Instead, he goes rogue, dispatching the bad guys one by one using his intellect and lethal traps based on sound-scientific principles. The Amateur is quite possibly the first action movie in which a terrorist is sent to his grave by a remotely controlled device that decompresses the glass panels of his rooftop swimming pool.

Rami Malek and Rachel Brosnahan in The Amateur.Credit: 20th Centruy Studios

Malek believes Heller is a new kind of action hero: a lethal geek. “I wanted to do this in a way that subverts the genre and makes you feel you’re in the driver’s seat alongside an ordinary human being,” he explains. “I’d like to think I can play a more relatable character because of my size and my unusual features; a character who engenders some empathy because he’s going on this quest driven by integrity, to avenge the woman who made him whole.”

I’m not convinced Charlie Heller is quite as mould-breaking a character as Malek thinks. It’s worth noting that Littell’s book was first turned into a film in the 1980s and the idea of a protagonist who brings villains to heel using his brain instead of his fists is hardly new. But fair play to the man: his enthusiasm for the project, his investment in telling the story as well as he can, is infectious.

The Amateur is also a yardstick of how far he’s travelled, how much power he wields since winning the Oscar. He is one of the film’s executive producers and makes it clear he was involved in every aspect of the production. For example, its director James Hawes, an Englishman who made the first season of TV’s Slow Horses as well as the 2023 biographical drama One Life, was a Malek hire.

“What a win!” he exclaims. “It was nice, as a producer, to bring James to my fellow producers and say ‘hey, this is the guy’. He’s a brilliant man. Intellectually and creatively he brought so many things my way.”

Hawes told Malek to listen to The Smile – the Radiohead spinoff group fronted by Thom Yorke – because he figured Heller would be a music nut and the band’s esoteric blend of jazz, kraut rock and prog would be something he’d admire. Hawes also wanted to incorporate some Ted Hughes poems – not something you find in the average action movie – but Heller’s sprawling record collection and the verse both failed to make the final cut.

Rami Malek plays what he calls a “lethal geek” in The Amateur.Credit: John Wilson

Malek admits he was unconvinced by The Smile – “Charlie would be more interested in classical music” – but retains a giddy admiration for Hawes. “James had such an exceptional vision for who this human being was … we talked on the same level as I did with [showrunner] Sam Esmail on Mr. Robot,” he says. “All we wanted was to make something authentic that spoke to people and society as a whole.”

Perhaps I’m wrong, but it’s hard to imagine Jason Statham and Vin Diesel listening to Schubert or reading T.S. Eliot to add nuance to their big-screen tough guys.

Does Malek marvel at how far he’s come? This son of Egyptian immigrants who spoke Arabic at home until he was four and struggled to fit in at school must surely pinch himself when he looks in the mirror and sees a Hollywood star. When he stood at the lectern at the 91st Academy Awards, he made reference to his 20-year journey to Tinseltown’s high table.“I think about what it would have been like to tell little bubba Rami that one day this might happen to him,” he said. “And I think his curly haired little mind would be blown.”

Rami Malek accepts his best actor Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody. Credit: AP

He says he hopes his success will pave the way for more diversity in Hollywood. “I think the great thing about cinema, and what I’m able to do today, is to allow kids who grew up the way I did to not feel like outsiders. To feel that the hero can be the guy who looks a bit different, who is unexpected and unappreciated, who just needs to work his ass off to succeed.”

He pauses, then says: “Maybe that’s too idealistic. Maybe people will just be entertained by an incredible cinematic experience with an unexpected hero doing some unabashedly extraordinary things.”

There’s no disputing the fact Malek has paid his dues. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer – Sami, his twin brother, is a teacher; sister Yasmine is a doctor – but after treading the boards at high school he studied drama at university in Indiana. Moving to New York, he performed in off-off Broadway plays and shared a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side with two other aspiring actors. The toilet, he says with a degree of pride, was in the kitchen.

After making the move to Los Angeles, he spent his days stuffing his headshot into envelopes and mailing them to anyone with a foothold in the industry. He attended endless cattle call auditions and weathered the inevitable rejection. Did he consider giving up?

“Yeah. I mean I’m human. Of course I did,” he says. “I tried to get a real estate licence at one point. You try everything. But deep down inside I always knew there was something in me that wouldn’t give up. It’s taken 20 or so years to get where I am – I’ve been banging on doors for a long time.”

Slowly, the doors began to open. His first TV role was in an episode of the sitcom Gilmore Girls that aired in 2004. His feature film debut came two years later when he played Pharaoh Ahkmenrah in the comedy Night at the Museum, a role he reprised in the sequels. Inevitably, he was often chosen to play generic Middle Eastern terrorists, a form of lazy typecasting that prompted him to tell his agent to turn down any part that painted people from the region in a bad light.

One of his biggest breaks was joining the cast of the acclaimed World War II miniseries The Pacific, a companion piece to Band of Brothers, produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks. His turn as the cocky Corporal Merriell “Snafu” Shelton so impressed Hanks that he wrote to Malek praising his performance. It’s revealing that Malek, who takes a deep dive into every character he plays, found the process of filming The Pacific so intense he temporarily quit Hollywood and lived in Argentina.

He’s clearly sustained by a closeness to his family. Sami, in particular, has played an important role in his career. “He’s always kept me really grounded. I run everything by him,” says Malek. “After doing The Pacific he said ‘wow, I didn’t know you were capable of that’. Sami holds me to a certain standard and I always have him in the back of my head when I’m considering what to do next.”

Rami Malek and Emma Corrin at last year’s Venice Film Festival.Credit: Getty Images

He’s rather less forthcoming about his relationships. When he accepted the Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, he paid tribute to the English actor Lucy Boynton, his co-star (she played Mary Austin, Mercury’s first true love and muse) and girlfriend. Boynton, he said, had “captured my heart”. They split in 2023 and Malek is now in a relationship with another fast-rising English star, Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in the fourth season of The Crown. Reports in the British press have suggested the pair are engaged.

Hoping to draw some details from him I inquire innocently if he’s something of an Anglophile? “How could I not be?” he replies promisingly, before dashing any hope of a revelation. “I came to London on my own dime, two years before I started shooting Bohemian Rhapsody. I learned to play the piano and took singing lessons. I didn’t have a ton of money in the bank at that point, but I made a bet on myself. And I started to fall in love with the UK.

“And then when we started to shoot the film here it was incredible. I was rehearsing at Abbey Road studios and I met the surviving members of Queen. I was all over London just experiencing it and embracing it.”

Well played Mr Malek. Your secrets remain safe. A cryptologist like Charlie Heller would surely be proud.

The Amateur opens in cinemas on April 10.

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