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Queen for a Day

Emmy winner Rami Malek, 37, is an uncanny doppelgänger for Queen virtuoso
Freddie Mercury in director Bryan Singer's upcoming rock drama.

By Kevin P. Sullivan in Entertainment Weekly

here are few people in music history as recognizable as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury -- and not just his face but his four-octave voice and flamboyant physicality. Rami Malek is well aware of that fact.

"When you're able to open your eyes and see a different person staring back at you in the mirror," Malek says, "it's a very affirming moment." The Mr. Robot star is preparing to play Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Bryan Singer-directed film that chronicles Queen from 1970, when Mercury teamed with Brian May and Roger Taylor, until the band's performance at Live Aid in 1985, six years before the singer's AIDS-related death. Malek (above) channels Mercury's look from that global-concert event. Resembling the legendary musician, he says, "only adds to the level of confidence that one would need to play Freddie Mercury."

Singer (right) describes his approach to Bohemian Rhapsody (out Nov. 2, 2018) as "not a traditional biopic" but rather a story honoring the music. "It won't just be the dark Freddie story, but that being said, that also will be honored," Singer says. "It's about collaboration. It's a celebration."

The first trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody was released on May 15. It opens with Malek as Mercury, wearing a fluttering white cape, engaging in the familiar call-and-response with an audience that was one of Queen's signature live concert staple moves, before cutting to snippets of Malek as Mercury in a gold lamé jumpsuit, a black leather outfit and shirtless while wielding the late singer's iconic half microphone stand as the instantly recognizable strains of "Another One Bites the Dust" kick in. The trailer then depicts Mercury's first meeting with guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy), and then to a scene in which Brian May plays the central "Rhapsody" riff in the studio and Mercury informs him from the mixing board "this is where the operatic section comes in." The trailer peaks with a glimpse of the massive crowd at Wembley Stadium in 1985 when Queen leaped into history with their unforgettable set at Live Aid.  

Sex, Drugs, and Disco

A new book celebrates the most exclusive -- and debauched -- club in New York history.

By Ben Ratliff in Esquire

tudio 54, in its first and most newsworthy incarnation, lasted less than three years, from April 1977 to February 1980. And yet, decades later, it remains the standard by which all other nightclubs are judged and found modest by comparison. The club is as famous for letting cool people in (like, say, Bianca Jagger on a white horse) as it is for keeping cool people out: After being turned away at the door, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic wrote a song initially titled "Fuck Off," which became the dance-floor favorite "Le Freak." Donald Trump made the scene, too. It was a place where you might go expressly to be photographed, and also to do illicit things in the basement. It is central to the short history of disco, a fundamentally inclusive musical movement, yet its DJ lore is often downplayed in favor of its boldfaced names. Each night, an animatronic man in the moon hanging from the ceiling lit up after raising a spoon to its nose.

Neither of its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, ever wrote a book about experience. But for its 40th anniversary, Schrager has released Studio 54 (Rizzoli, $50.84), featuring hundreds of photos from the club's heyday, many of them from his personal albums: Michael Jackson and David Bowie, presidential families and news anchors, the SNL crew, Diana Ross, Tennessee Williams, Halston, Roy Cohn, Richard Pryor, Vladimir Horowitz -- a fairly broad representation of American achievement, and not a handler or cell-phone camera in sight. Best of all are the pictures of the club with no one in them, and of workers setting up. It was, after all, a real building on a real street.  

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