One of the big “what ifs” in recent movie history is when Sacha Baron Cohen almost played Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
The actor was attached to the project from 2010 but pulled out three years later, claiming that Roger Taylor and Brian May “wanted to protect their legacy as a band” rather than make a proper biopic about Mercury’s life.
And it sounds like Taylor has been holding a grudge against Borat himself ever since. As per Metro, the drummer shared his thoughts about the skills of Baron Cohen in a new interview with Classic Rock magazine.
“I think he would have been utter shit,” he said, not mincing his words. “Sacha is pushy, if nothing else. He’s also six inches too tall. But I watched his last five films and came to the conclusion he’s not a very good actor.”
Tell us what you really think, Roger Taylor. He continued with a more measured response. “I might be wrong there. I thought he was an utterly brilliant subversive comedian, that’s what he’s great at,” he conceded. “Anyway, I think Rami did a brilliant job in an almost impossible role.”
It turned out well in the end for the biopic. Rami Malek took over the role as Mercury and, despite some ludicrous prosthetics, won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance.
Bohemian Rhapsody did attract criticism for the timeline of events in the film, including changing the date Mercury told his bandmates he was HIV positive. Taylor had an answer for that though, arguing that the biopic “didn’t fictionalise the real story, only in detail.”
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“When you’re making a movie, which is approximately a hundred minutes long, you have to mess with the timeline to make it work,” he stated. “The movie has to work, that’s priority one.”
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Check out the trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody:
