“Let’s see. Which way am I going?”
The question is, of course, rhetorical. Looking back as he speaks, Malek nimbly navigates a maze of monitors, tripods, coiled cables and coffee tables in an already labyrinthine suite at The London hotel in the West Hollywood section of Los Angeles. “See, even back here I’m in my London bubble,” says Malek, a California native who’s outside Britain for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic struck properly back in March.
After a few sidesteps, Malek reaches behind drawn curtains, opens a pair of glass doors and we emerge onto a sprawling terrace with commanding views of the city. He sits on a long, L-shape sofa, the Hollywood sign visible in the distance behind him. “Ahhh. Here, this is a good two metres,” he says, his embrace of the metric system a sign of England’s effect on him. He gestures at his facemask: “Can I... Can I take this off?”
Although I say yes and remove my own face covering, Malek leaves his on, even while talking. “This is very much home and not just in heart,” says the 39-year-old actor, who grew up a few miles away. “So it’s been really sweet to spend time with my family in the last few days, even with the masks on.” In addition to seeing family, Malek is in Los Angeles to get back, however haltingly, to work. He’s spent the past several hours in various parts of this hotel suite recording a series of behind-the-scenes commentaries for No Time To Die – the 25th instalment of the James Bond franchise – in which Malek, if you didn’t know already, plays the mysterious arch-villain Safin.
Those promotional videos are, today, right here and now, among the mounting signs that the film is definitely, maybe, hopefully coming to theatres less than two months from this late September day. “Yeah, it seems like we’re actually going to release in November,” Malek adds. “Fingers crossed.” He shrugs as if to say, “Who knows?”
Malek’s uncertainty, as we all now know, will prove to be short-lived. A little over a week later, just a day after Billie Eilish drops the video for No Time To Die’s eponymous theme song, the producers announced that the already delayed film – perhaps the movie business’ last hope for a blockbuster in 2020 – was shifting again, to April 2021, a full year after its original release date.
If it were made by a different studio (say, one that had its own streaming service) or on a smaller budget (it cost a reported £195 million to make, let alone the marketing bill that has had to contend with two false starts already) or been a one-off rather than the latest in a storied series, perhaps No Time To Die could have joined the exodus from theatres to video-on-demand. But the film’s distributor, Universal, and its producers, MGM and Eon, had massive – potentially £1 billion – expectations for the film as a theatrical release, as did battered cinema owners. (Two days after the latest delay was announced, Cineworld announced it was closing all its UK and US screens indefinitely, with many in the press blaming the closures solely at the feet of the delayed Bond movie.)
Ultimately, however terrible the fallout, the keepers of Fleming’s flame at Eon – the film company that owns the Bond franchise, run by Albert Broccoli’s heirs, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli – just couldn’t take the financial risk that would mean a Covid-restricted release. After all, in the universe of a Bond franchise it isn’t just the world at stake but cold, hard cash. And a lot of it.
The film was set to be Malek’s follow-up to his Bafta, Oscar and Golden Globe-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. When the actor received word that the film’s release was pushed back, initially by only seven months, “It made sense,” he tells me now. “Everything was shifting in the world.” Instead of capitalising on his career momentum, Malek knew there was only one thing for it: cocoon and wait out the storm with loved ones.
He holed up in North London with the actress Lucy Boynton, his costar in Bohemian Rhapsody and girlfriend of two years. There has been cooking, some of it quite refined (“I may have impressed Lucy on a few occasions. I make a pretty mean chicken Milanese.”) There was cycling (“In the hour a day we got to exercise, I would ride through what seemed like post-apocalyptic Piccadilly and all over the city, parts of London I probably would have never been able to see otherwise.”) There was a stark photographic study of the empty spaces (“I felt odd taking out my camera at times, but it was such a rare, historic experience, I wanted to capture it.”) There were moments of profound pain and protest (“As an American, it was inspiring to be in London and see everybody come together in support of black lives all over the world.”) Most of all, though, Malek spent the quarantine in a pair of busy, full places: his head and his heart. “It was predominantly a time of great reflection,” he says.
“I think we’ve all been doing a lot of self-examination and prioritising and acknowledging just how much our relationships mean to us. It’s not something I didn’t know before, but it’s been helpful to take a step back and just really acknowledge how I’m living and how to improve, take better care of ourselves and the world we live in.” Malek says this not with self-serving piety, but sweetness and sensitivity, his already impossibly round eyes expanding to emphasise his sincerity. He embodies all those admirable traits celebrities often tout a little too willingly, yet he infuses them with an earnest kineticism. When Malek talks, such is his conviction, one believes him – a neat skill to have as an actor, one assumes.
One benefit of social-distancing etiquette is the ability to see Malek’s whole body as we talk. It is rarely still. He compacts himself, leaning forward as he speaks, gesticulating with his head, hands and shoulders. In a series of compact tics, he can convey excitement without shifting his weight or focus.
When he juts out his chin, he displays the defiant wilfulness he’s needed to move forward over the years. There was no template or road map for Malek to follow. However, it seems fitting that this rail-thin Egyptian-American with harvest-moon eyes and swarthy skin rode the part of an improbable star – a flamboyant gay singer with supernumerary teeth born Farrokh Bulsara – to his own improbable stardom.
No sooner had Malek succeeded in playing a leading man than he decided to play the foil. “Look, there was no way I was going to say no,” he says of the opportunity to battle Bond in No Time To Die. “It’s a 007 film, man. They’re a part of our cinematic history.” The fact it would be Daniel Craig’s final time strapping on a Walther PPK only added to the appeal. “An opportunity to go toe-to-toe, head-to-head with Daniel and give them all I got? That’s something I’ll look back on as as big as it gets.”
Malek wasn’t the only one who relished the dramatic duel. “I go up against people. I’m up against him,” explains Craig when I speak to him about Malek. “Rami knows me. He understands the weight of what he’s playing. He understands he’s playing a Bond villain – what that means, what it means historically and the kind of Bond villains that have come before. Rami’s really good at his job. I mean, that’s an understatement.”
A few hours before I met Malek, Hollywood news outlets flooded email inboxes with a sad update: “Michael Lonsdale, former Bond villain and The Day Of The Jackal star, dies at 89.” As the headline suggests, playing a Bond villain – even in a middling film such as Moonraker – can do more than overshadow lead roles; it can define a decades-long career. “It puts things into context when that’s the title of your obituary,” Malek says, nodding solemnly. “Fortunately, I’ve played some transformative characters and I hope they all speak for themselves. I don’t know, maybe some louder than others. Safin will speak loudly, I hope.”
One hallmark of the Daniel Craig era is talented nemeses – fictional villainy grounded in reality. It began with highly regarded actors Mads Mikkelsen and Mathieu Amalric in Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, respectively. They were followed by Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva in Skyfall and Christoph Waltz as Ernst Blofeld in Spectre, both of whom had won an Academy Award for playing ruthless bad guys previously. With the bar raised, Malek’s challenge is to clear it.
“First of all, Rami belongs in that company and in the same breath as any of the truly great actors. The awards tell you that but so does his work,” says Cary Fukunaga, whose challenge in directing No Time To Die was to give Craig a suitable sendoff as 007 and a worthy adversary. In each recent film, the villain’s reach and diabolical designs have gotten grander. “Once we got into Christoph Waltz/Blofeld territory, you can’t go small again,” Fukunaga says. “We had to think bigger. It’s tricky because you don’t want to make a cliché super villain, but you have to make someone that’s threatening not only to Bond and the people he loves but to the world at large.”
Driven by a hunger for vengeance, Safin is an adversary more at home in horror thrillers than a spy film. “We really did sit down,” Malek says, “and think about what would truly frighten us, what would send a real panic into our hearts. It’s that sense of dread that sets it apart.”
Fukunaga recounts a scene early in the film in which Malek’s Safin pursues and attacks a young girl. Between takes, the director told me, Malek tenderly asked after his peer: “Are you all right? How are you? Feeling OK about all this?” Fukunaga expands on this: “She was fine. But here’s Rami, right in her face with this frightening prosthetic skin, talking sweetly. Then the camera rolls and he’s back to the villain again, pushing her underwater.” On it went, with each take, Malek alternately between sweet and vicious. “It was pure Rami,” says Fukunaga, laughing. “Gentle and sweet and then surreally twisted at the same time.”
It’s fitting, then, that Safin wears a Japanese Noh mask, which has different expressions depending on the light and angle at which it’s viewed. Masks loom large in No Time To Die and in Malek’s multilayered portrayal. “Not many actors can revel so gloriously in being creepy while maintaining a sort of wonky humanity,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who cowrote the film. “I think the best villains dare to have a tease of something soft in their eye and Rami knows exactly how to do that.”
Since he was a child watching 007 films on VHS, Malek has believed Dr No is the best of the Bond villains. He loves when Joseph Wiseman calls Sean Connery “a stupid policeman”, he says. “That always elicits a laugh.” Malek seems aware of the internet rumours surrounding Safin, the most popular of which suggests he’s a 21st-century incarnation of Dr No. “Yes,” Malek says, nodding thoughtfully. “That’s interesting. I’m not going to bite on that, but I do think it’s interesting. They’ll just have to wait and see.”
One of Malek and Fukunaga’s goals was to make sure Safin was not a caricatured villain who divulges the details of his plan. Malek just smiles, tight-lipped when asked about a host of theories running rampant online: Bond becomes a father; Bond dies; Safin employs a biological weapon capable of causing a global pandemic. “Let the rumours fly,” Malek says, “because no matter what you expect from this movie, you will be shocked when you watch the film. I will not add any fuel to that fire.”
Rami Said Malek was raised in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, by parents who emigrated from Egypt. His father worked as an insurance salesman and his mother as an accountant. Technically, Malek is a middle child. He has an older sister, Yasmine, an ER doctor, and a younger brother, by four minutes, his identical twin, Sami, now a high-school teacher. Malek and his siblings were brought up in the Coptic Christian faith and Malek spoke Egyptian Arabic at home until age four. He kept the mother tongue sharp, making “my best attempt at Arabic” on 2am calls to his father’s family in Samalut, a small city several hours south of Cairo. “I’d be talking to entire multiple generations that were living in the same house that my father, his father and his grandfather grew up in.” Although Malek didn’t visit Egypt until he was in his late teens, it loomed large in his consciousness.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley – home of the “Valley Girl” and epicentre of American youth culture in the 1980s – Malek often wrestled with his identity. He and Sami would impersonate one other. Other times Malek would play at creating characters and giving them voices. He had trouble, however, finding his own.
Throughout his childhood, people mispronounced his name, but it wasn’t until high school that he felt confident enough to correct his peers. “In terms of who I was, I can never quite put my finger on it,” Malek says. “I saw a childhood friend yesterday and you return to those moments, like, ‘Who was I?’ I didn’t have an idea of where I fit in. Still don’t. Probably because I never felt like I fit in.”
Malek attended a Catholic high school, Notre Dame, where, outwardly at least, he was more of a drifter than an outcast. “I was all over the place,” he recalls. “I would hang out with the theatre kids sometimes, the punk rock kids sometimes, some of the athletes every once in a while, but it was a very diverse lunch table – a very eclectic, multiethnic, extremely diverse group.”
Intent on fulfilling his parents’ wish that he become a lawyer, Malek joined the debate team. He had no interest in acting until his coach convinced him his debating style was too dramatic and got him to perform a one-person play, Zooman And The Sign. It was like manna from heaven. “He saw something in me,” Malek recalls. “He gave me this great play and that just was some force of nature I immediately recognised. I felt like I had some idea of how to channel all the creative energy that was inside me.”
Having caught the acting bug, Malek was quizzing a classmate, a former child actor, on the movie and TV industry when his friend drove him to Hollywood for the first time. A short 15 minutes away, across Mulholland Drive and over the hill, was Sunset Boulevard, the Sunset Strip’s lights and the Walk Of Fame. “That was the first time I experienced Hollywood,” Malek says. “I really had no idea that this all existed.”
Malek’s passion for acting distressed his parents, who wanted him to focus on education and a stable profession. “They came all this way, worked so hard and I think they saw it as throwing that away – it was a difficult thing to accept,” Malek explains. Eventually, he got their blessing by promising to get a college degree to fall back on if acting didn’t pan out. He studied drama at Evansville University in Indiana and started to spread his wings: he spent a semester in England at the Harlaxton College in Lincolnshire and interned at the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut.
After college, Malek went to New York looking for work in the theatre. Then, at the suggestion of a casting director, he returned to Los Angeles, moving back in with his parents and sleeping on the sofa of their two-bedroom apartment. He took work as a pizza delivery man, making shawarma and falafel at a restaurant in Hollywood. If an order was going to anyone Malek deduced might be a director or producer, he would surreptitiously stick a headshot and resume in with their food.
His perseverance didn’t pay off handsomely. For every mainstream talking part (the guy in the Bible study on Gilmore Girls or the teenage friend who came out on the sitcom The War At Home) there was a Middle Eastern terrorist (for example, the Iraqi insurgent found in a car trunk and tortured in Over There). Far more numerous, however, were the dead-end auditions; the repeated rejections left him dejected.
Malek says he wrestled with depression and considered giving up acting altogether to pursue a career in real estate. “I doubted myself all the time,” he confesses. “I don’t think that doubt is something that ever leaves, particularly after hearing ‘no’ countless times and not getting a call back for a long time. That creates a certain veneer. All the rejection, it does thicken the skin.”
Meanwhile, others seemed more focused on the colour of his skin. Typecasting, rightly or wrongly, helped him get his first part in a movie. He appeared in a sarcophagus and mummy bandages before emerging as the Pharaoh Ahkmenrah in 2006’s Night At The Museum (a role he reprised in the 2009 and 2014 sequels). “I remember they asked me, ‘Are you Egyptian?’” Malek says, recalling being asked to read for the part. “For the first time I was like, ‘Wow, this is a good thing.’”
More often, when Malek’s ethnic background brought him work it was, at best, a double-edged sword. Like his part in series eight of 24: on the one hand, Malek landed a sizeable, recurring role on a prime time television show, on the other he was playing an Islamic jihadist in an episodic encapsulation of and apologia for the Bush/Blair war on terror – a would-be suicide bomber named “Marcos Al-Zacar” who goes on to be saved from his own attempt at martyrdom and mass murder.
Soon after the three-episode arc aired, Malek was getting on a plane. Air travel was already a fraught experience for him, full of frequent, statistics-defying random searches at the security check, side-eye glances and microaggressions on either side of it. During boarding, a fellow passenger recognised him from television. Rather than disarm the fan, the sight of Malek seemed to weaponise him as he announced to a plane full of suddenly jittery passengers: “‘I wouldn’t sit next to that guy’ and ‘Better search him again,’” Malek recalls. He was struck by the conflation and collision of art and life. “Never again,” he told his agents, no more roles that perpetuate negative stereotypes about Middle Easterners. “Now, in retrospect, of course, that’s something I’m proud of and that I hope continues to set a standard for actors who feel compromised,” he says. “At the time, I was terrified.”
Later that year, Malek appeared in The Pacific, HBO’s ten-part miniseries about American marines battling the Japanese in the Pacific theatre. Although the show won awards, neither it nor its ensemble cast pierced the public’s consciousness. However, Malek’s performance – as “Snafu”, a soldier psychologically scarred by the ravages of warfare – made directors of note take note.
Tom Hanks, one of The Pacific’s executive producers, wrote Malek a letter during filming, lauding his performance, and promptly gave him a part in the 2011 film he directed, Larry Crowne. Paul Thomas Anderson cast him in The Master, alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix. Spike Lee put Malek in a pair of films, Oldboy and Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus. There were other small parts in big movies, such as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2, and bigger roles in smaller ones, such as the indie Short Term 12. All told, as he entered his mid-thirties, Malek had levelled up to semi-recognisability and could look forward to a long, stolid career as a character actor, a lifetime of being “that guy from that thing”.
Then, with the help of another Egyptian-American – a little-known writer-producer named Sam Esmail – Malek managed to hack his career and dramatically alter its trajectory. Cast by Esmail as the lead in Mr Robot, Malek played Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity programmer and hacker with deep social anxiety, clinical depression and dissociative identity disorder. Amid a series of paranoid delusions, Elliot becomes entangled with a hacktivist collective that throws the global economy – and his psyche – into disarray.
Malek played Elliot with hunched shoulders and sleepy, screen-strained eyes, but he relied on research to truly inhabit the role – lots of research. He prepared by reading academic papers on schizophrenia and cybersecurity. He studied and mimicked the typing patterns hackers used while coding. He enlisted the services of a psychologist, talking to him extensively. Then, citing critiques and analyses so often to Esmail, the showrunner decided to bring the psychologist on to consult on the series.
Malek and Esmail quickly developed a shorthand and began to refer to each other in familial terms, as brothers. “We didn’t have much choice,” Malek jokes. “Our mums talk to each other on the phone.” The two have several projects incubating and if it weren’t for Covid-19 Malek would be filming one with Esmail right now. Over Mr Robot’s four series, Malek racked up three Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series. More, the series established Malek as a leading man on screen, in fashion (he was the face of Dior Homme’s Spring 2017 campaign) and in popular perception.
Before Bohemian Rhapsody even got the green light, Malek had himself fitted for prosthetic dentures that replicated the unique shape of Mercury’s mouth, complete with four extra teeth. He was determined to be ready. “I didn’t even know if I had the role at that point,” Malek says, “but I thought, if the opportunity ever does present itself, I’d like to be in a place where I feel comfortable enough to accept the challenge. And, for me, that meant getting those teeth as quickly as possible and essentially beginning some type of rehearsal process, at least a year in advance.”
There were singing lessons and lots of film study – some of it of Mercury’s mother speaking. Malek decided to dissect her accent – Gujarati Indian by way of Zanzibar then Feltham – which Malek knew affected Mercury’s speech, however minutely. “He just had a very particular accent and, in wanting to research everything about him, I was interested to see if any of the sounds of his voice had been influenced by his upbringing, by his mother’s accent. I felt like I could hear that every once in a while, so it was worthwhile,” Malek says, as if this is all standard – because for him it is. “I’m just doing my job. Maybe it’s a bit too aggressive sometimes,” he says of his obsessive preparation, then laughs. “People have brought that up.”
Bohemian Rhapsody followed a difficult path to success. Before it became the biggest biopic of all time, earning £700m worldwide on a budget of around £39m, it was a production in crisis. Director Bryan Singer, who shot The Usual Suspects and launched the multibillion-pound X-Men franchise, was fired near the end of shooting, after failing to return to set and following repeated absences (he says he was tending to an ill relative). When he was present, Singer clashed with cast members, including Malek. Later, an investigation in the Atlantic exposed Singer’s sexual misconduct and serial exploitation of young male actors (charges he denies). But, Malek says, “By that time, everyone had put the pieces together.”
It fell to Malek to recruit British actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher – who had been attached to shoot an earlier iteration of the project – to complete the film. Over an intimate dinner, Malek pleaded his case, as Fletcher tells me: “He said to me at one point, quite passionately, ‘Look, you could shit in the middle of the set and everybody would still think you’re great.’ It was a funny but bold statement to make it. It just let me know how passionate and committed he was and how bad he felt things were going.”
When Fletcher arrived on set, he saw that Malek had been holding the cast and film together. “I caught on very quickly that Rami was the leader. It was something that was solely earned by merit,” Fletcher says. “It was never -dictatorial or because he played Freddie the frontman. It was his compassion and caring, that inclusive, supportive nature, that meant the rest of the gang entrusted him with that position as their mouthpiece.”
According to Malek, the tumultuous time on set brought the cast together. “Something extraordinary happened, where we all rose to the occasion,” he says. “We developed a natural dependency on one another to make something great and look after each other. I forged friendships that I know I will have for the rest of my life. Full stop.”
If that seems like a comment on the highest-profile relationship to emerge from the film – his romance with Boynton – Malek seems OK with that. He lights up at every mention of the actress, her work, her upcoming film, Faithfull (a biopic about Marianne Faithfull), and he almost seems to lament the end of lockdown. “It was special to have that time with her.”
After Bohemian Rhapsody wrapped and before it was released, Malek got to know Bond 25 director Cary Fukunaga socially through Boynton, whose friend is dating the director. That familiarity helped when Fukunaga offered Malek the role of Safin. Malek accepted readily but was adamant he wouldn’t play Safin as Middle Eastern.
Time was tight and the stakes were high. Fukunaga was taking over from Danny Boyle, who’d parted ways over creative differences (reportedly a disagreement over whether or not to “86” the venerable 007). Fukunaga and Waller-Bridge were still writing the screenplay at night, well into production. They began shaping Safin on the fly. His face was to be badly scarred, which required applying prosthetic skin and make-up to Malek for two-and-a-half hours each day. More uncomfortable for Malek was diving into the role without his usual, or really any, preparation.
Malek and Fukunaga had only spent half a day together fleshing out the character when the schedule called for Malek to shoot a sequence in Norway, during a short break on production of Mr Robot’s final series. He left directly after an 18-hour shoot in New York, flew ten hours to Norway, then sat for fittings and emerged sleepless yet somehow ready to begin a full day of shooting as Safin.
Malek’s highlight came when he and Craig had time to rework the crucial tête-à-tête scene between Safin and Bond. Then they called in Fukunaga and Waller-Bridge, who joined them, laying on the tatami mats of the set with their pages out, moving lines and cutting them, adjusting them. As Malek and Craig batted the dialogue back and forth, the brains trust added nuance and tone, darkness and light – a cramming session with stakes as high as any poker game Bond has ever played.
Malek fondly recalls celebrating their brainstorming session by going out with Craig and toasting their collaboration with a Negroni. “It was more than one,” Craig says, correcting his costar’s memory. “You can’t do one Negroni. That’s just sacrilege.” But Craig, too, celebrates their chemistry. “There’s an alchemy that happens when you’re making a movie, which is like you put all these things together,” he says. “When you’re working with Rami, you just know he is aware of all those things. He’s got this big, active brain, so I know he’s pushing all the right buttons.”
Waller-Bridge found working with Malek to be a revelation. “He’s magnetic to watch, a load of fun, passionate and incredibly smart,” she says. “He’s an electric personality on screen and off, but, for me, it’s his fearlessness and playfulness that sets him apart.”
As dusk settles over Hollywood, a pair of spotlights from a pop-up drive-in movie in a parking lot pierce the smoky air – a reminder of how the pandemic has altered the film experience. Malek says he’d be shocked if the spotlights ever shine for a premiere of No Time To Die. He’s just pleased it will be coming out. Eventually.
“Essentially, we make these films for entertainment,” Malek says. “So ultimately it would be great if people feel it’s safe enough to be able to see this film in the cinema. And maybe that could be some type of marker that we are returning to some sort of normalcy, whatever that is. And I hope that it is possible for reasons bigger than this film.”
Malek’s one other project he completed before Covid-19, The Little Things, is due to be released some time next year. In it, he plays a city detective opposite a wizened sheriff portrayed by Denzel Washington. The film is a two-hander, with the main characters given equal weight in the movie. “That’s the way it’s written, but we’ll see,” Malek says modesty. “When you have Denzel in the movie, I don’t think you can take your eyes off of him. It’s so clear and present why that man is a movie star.”
What Malek sees in his idol Washington, others see in him. Fletcher, who likens Malek to Al Pacino, says Malek has already moved the needle. “Rami is a leading man and now it’s about how that reshapes people’s thinking in the industry.” Craig thinks it’s simpler, if more elusive. “They always talk about that star quality,” Craig explains. “Without going through every cliché in the book, Rami’s got ‘it’. He just lights up the screen. Rami has massive inner life, you know? It makes him watchable. It makes you want to know what he’s going to do next.”
As our time ends, Malek talks about his plans. Before returning to London, he’ll see some friends and spend some more time with his mother (his father passed away in 2006). Tonight, however, he’ll leave this ersatz English hotel for the home he bought not far from the one he grew up in as a child, where he’ll break bread with his brother, Sami. “We’ll each try to cook for the other. We’ll probably both end up in the kitchen,” Malek says, as he pulls on a leather backpack, strides ahead and disappears inside a door. He pokes his head out into the hallway. “See, I knew where I was going all along.” I can’t help but wonder what the world, cinematic or otherwise, will look like next time we see him.
No Time To Die is out on 2 April 2021
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Photographed by Kurt Iswarienko. Styled by Ilaria Urbinati.
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