Rami Malek almost turned the down his role in Ira Sach’s The Man I Love, as a gay, singing performance artist in 1980s New York at the height of the AIDS crisis, because he worried he’d be accused of self-plagiarizing his Oscar-winning role as Freddie Mercury in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody.  

“At first when I read [Sachs’s] script I said, ‘No, I can’t do this. There’s too many similarities. It could be problematic,” Malek said Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival press conference for the film, which received a 7-minute standing ovation at its world premiere Wednesday night and is now being talked about as a potential winner of the Palme d’Or. 

There’s a certain sense of fear,” he continued, “and I started to really think about what I was afraid of. Was it the similarities? Was it the singing? Was it obviously what was going on in the period?… And I knew I had to address the fear. If there’s anything Freddie taught me, it was ‘Address the fear.’”

Malek is already getting Oscars buzz for his performance as Jimmy, an enigmatic and magnetic performance artist preparing for what he knows may be his last time onstage.

Malek said he soon realized Jimmy and Freddie weren’t nearly as similar as they appeared on paper. Freddie Mercury was an icon, and Jimmy, his character in Sachs’s film, was a talented but struggling artist doing a downtown experimental theater recreation of a French movie nobody’s heard about, in what he knows may be his last time onstage.

“Jimmy is just searching for creativity and love and intimacy and joy and pleasure in every moment, and he can sing,” Malek explained. “Does he sing as well as Freddie? No…. Was it ever going to be perfect? Didn’t have to be. It was just about this element of creating and living in joy.”

Jimmy, like a lot of artists in New York at the time, just wanted to impress the people who lived next door, Sachs explained.

“There are a lot of people who aspire to be someone like Freddie Mercury,” Malek went on, “and there are a lot of artists in the world who don’t get to that level, but still have an abundance of talent and skill and a world to offer that is maybe unseen by the masses, but communally get some recognition, or they find a way to recognize it amongst themselves, and perhaps that can be almost as gratifying.” 

And with Jimmy, he said, he wanted to make a portrait of those people, whose work was beloved by a few, and who died far too young, but who should nonetheless not be forgotten. 

Malek said he also had a fear that Sachs wouldn’t want to work with him, after he requested a meeting with the director, whose work he’s admired for years. “People often say, after the Oscar, you just kind of get offered things,” said Malek. “It’s just not the case.”

But the two hit it off and Sachs said he cast Malek because Jimmy needed to have certain star quality that everyone around him would be drawn to. “I think that there is this suspense of ‘What’s going to happen?’ within a second,” Sachs told Malek at the press conference. “With Rami, you never know if he’s going to jump over the counter… There’s a danger there, and I think it’s really important for acting.” 

Danger seems an important element for a film that Sachs said was based on the “rage” and “anger” of having lived through the 1980s AIDS crisis at a time when the U.S. government was largely abandoning gay men. 

Sachs pointed out that at the time he was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — a guerilla activist group who staged protests like chaining themselves to the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high price of the only FDA-approved HIV/AIDS drug, AZT. 

“And the motto of ACT UP is ‘Silence Equals Death,’” said Sachs. 

Telling stories like this (and selling movies like this), Sachs said “is a fight, but we hope that in some ways the fight disappears. But the rage is in this film.”