Oscars 2019

Oscars 2019: How Rami Malek Rode His Underdog Status to a Best-Actor Win

The Bohemian Rhapsody and Mr. Robot star played the long game.
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When Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek took the stage to collect his best-actor Oscar statue Sunday night, his speech was shot through with humble thank-yous: “Thank you, Queen. Thank you, guys, for allowing me to be the tiniest part of your phenomenal, extraordinary legacy. I am forever in your debt . . . I may not have been the obvious choice, but I guess it worked out . . . My crew and my cast, I love you. You are my equals. You are my betters . . . To anyone struggling with [their identity] and trying to discover their voice. Listen, we made a film about a gay man, an immigrant . . . We’re longing for stories like this. I am the son of immigrants from Egypt. I’m a first-generation American. Part of my story is being written right now.”

Malek may have framed himself as an underdog in the fight for an Oscar, but his win came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention this awards season. Malek has practically run the table all year, picking up the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA, and more as he made his unstoppable run at Oscar. That streak would have seemed completely surprising to pundits any earlier in the season, who had their money initially on more likely candidates like Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale. Sure, Malek’s film, Bohemian Rhapsody, made a lot of money—but box-office success alone won’t get you a little gold man. Just ask the un-nominated cast of 2018’s most successful film: Black Panther.

Still, Malek had a few key Oscar factors in his favor—as well as a brilliantly executed strategy that allowed him to pace himself on the long road to awards-season victory.

The most reliable asset for an actor hoping to take home an Oscar is to play a real person. Seven of the 11 best-actor victors since 2009 have won for playing historical figures, ranging from Harvey Milk to Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Hawking, and Winston Churchill. The Academy’s other favorite quality is physical transformation—and Malek’s bucktoothed turn as Queen front man Freddie Mercury fit that bill as well.

If these elements alone were enough to secure a win, then surely Bale would be the one who ended up securing the top prize for his chameleonic turn as Dick Cheney in Vice.

But Bale—never one to rub elbows in Tinseltown—has been largely absent from the campaign trail this season. Perhaps that’s because his film, Vice, debuted to middling reviews and a muted box office. Or maybe that’s because he simply wasn’t in the mood: “I've not seen [Vice’s] Christian Bale anywhere,” one anonymous Oscar voter told The Hollywood Reporter during its infamous annual roundup of cantankerous Hollywood hot takes.

Cooper, the anointed early favorite out of Toronto, also declined to hustle for his statue early on in the awards season. The actor himself would dispute that critique—but still, ever since The New York Times ran with the headline “Bradley Cooper Is Not Really into This Profile,” the actors’s chances seemed to go into free fall. His descent culminated in a best-director snub that even Cooper said he was “embarrassed” by.

Malek, on the other hand, was everywhere this season. And because he’s relatively new to the film world, he was also able to work the circuit with some shades of Richard E. Grant’s humble just-happy-to-be-here vibe. Malek’s new-kid-on-the-block demeanor closely aped that of 2015 best-actor winner Eddie Redmayne, who was similarly committed to working every screening, party, and event he could on the way to his eventual win. “Rami Malek is going to win—everywhere I've gone, Rami Malek was there; he’s a very charming fellow,” T.H.R.’s cranky voter explained. “I’ve now spent more time with him than I have with my dog.”

Not even a significant awards-season scandal could stop Malek. The day after the actor was nominated for an Oscar, The Atlantic published a massive and damning piece on Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer, which allegedly corroborated long-gestating rumors about Singer’s relationships with underage boys. Singer has denied the allegations. Initially, Malek and his cohort tried to ignore the Singer issue on the circuit, neglecting to thank the director in their acceptance speeches and declining to discuss him at the Golden Globes. That strategy was undermined by Singer’s own social media, when the director took credit for Rhapsody’s big night at the Golden Globes.

But before The Atlantic story hit, denial was still Malek’s approach. The morning of his Oscar nomination, Malek told the Los Angeles Times: “I didn’t know much about Bryan. I think that the allegations and things were, believe it or not, honestly something I was not aware of [before signing on for Bohemian Rhapsody], and that is what it is. Who knows what happens with that . . . but I think somehow we found a way to persevere through everything that was thrown our way.” Malek then declined to address the Singer situation once more when collecting his Screen Actors Guild Award a few days later.

But several days later, Malek took the opportunity of an onstage conversation at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to finally tackle the elephant in the room. Speaking with T.H.R.’s Scott Feinberg, Malek positioned himself as an ally. The actor reportedly pushed to have Singer removed from the film, allegedly after the director’s long absences and antics on set complicated production. Though Singer was not fired for sexual misconduct, Malek told Feinberg: “For anyone who is seeking any solace in all of this, Bryan Singer was fired. Bryan Singer was fired. I don’t think that was something anyone saw coming, but I think that had to happen—and it did.”

After that, it appeared Malek’s Oscar was a foregone conclusion. It helped, in all this, that Malek could also leverage the left-leaning social messages of Bohemian Rhapsody in his campaign. Not only is Freddie Mercury a gay icon, but the centerpiece of the film is the 1985 Live Aid concert, which sought to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Many of the historical details of Bohemian Rhapsody may have been off, but Malek made it clear throughout his campaign that a vote for him was a vote for the eternally beloved, but once-upon-a-time misunderstood Mercury—and who was going to argue with that?

When Malek won the Emmy for Mr. Robot in 2016, he also positioned himself among the outsiders and outcasts of society. As he said during that victory speech: “I play a young man who is, like so many of us, profoundly alienated. I want to honor the Elliots. There’s a little bit of Elliot in all of us.” The same approach worked like a charm with Mercury fans—and, with an absolutely killer Queen soundtrack accompanying his journey all the way, Malek’s ended up being an awards season gambit you can tap your toes to.

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