What Would Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bohemian Rhapsody Film Have Been Like?

2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody was in development for nearly a decade – and a version with Sacha Baron Cohen as Freddie Mercury nearly took it in a very different direction.

2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody was a film that, for the members of the band Queen and many of its fans, ticked the right boxes. A sanitised, efficient telling of Freddie Mercury’s story, the movie won Oscars, made nearly a billion dollars at the box office, and talk of a follow-up continues. It turned the man who played Mercury, Rami Malek, into an actor high on Hollywood’s wishlist (most recently playing the villain in the latest James Bond film, albeit with an odd accent and a garden), and brought to an end what had been a very bumpy movie to get made.

A biopic of Mercury had been in the works since at least 2010, and it was around that time that Sacha Baron Cohen joined the project. The Borat and Bruno star was to play Mercury in the film, and quickly got the approval of the surviving members of Queen, who were actively involved in the development of the project. In particular, Brian May publicly endorsed his casting, and it seemed that the whole thing had legs.

But it was a difficult film to crack. So much so that it lingered in development hell for a few years, until, surprisingly, Baron Cohen apparently suddenly departed the project in 2013. Even at the time though, the story was that there were clear creative differences. That Cohen was pushing for a telling of Mercury’s story that was far more warts and all, and didn’t shy away from the singer’s sexuality, and his demons. It was said that what Brian May and Roger Taylor were looking for was something a bit more family friendly.

It was several years on before Baron Cohen would speak out about just what had gone wrong, and the war of words that the interview he gave sparked continues to this day.

In an conversation with American radio host Howard Stern, Baron Cohen confirmed that those aforementioned creative differences were real. In particular, he argued that the rest of Queen were worried about protecting their legacy with the movie. Whilst everybody made nice comments about each other a few years previous when they first parted company, here, Baron Cohen said that the band wanted a film where Mercury’s death would have happened in the middle of the story, and the second half would “see how the band carries on from strength to strength”. A story as much about Queen as it was about Mercury.

In all, Baron Cohen was working on the film to some degree for half a decade, and he’d tried to lure directors David Fincher and Tom Hooper to the movie. Arguing that Brian May was an “amazing musician” but “not a great movie producer”, neither Fincher nor Hooper would eventually sign on to the project, and in particular it’s fascinating to imagine what Fincher could have done with it. The former would instead pursue Gone Girl, the latter Cats.

It’d be fair to say that Baron Cohen didn’t endear himself to the surviving members of Queen with the Howard Stern chat, and he’s still talked about. At the end of 2021, Roger Taylor gave an interview to Classic Rock where he declared that had Baron Cohen played Mercury, “I think he would have been utter shit”. Describing him as too tall to play Freddie Mercury anyway, Taylor put the boot in just a little more by arguing “I watched his last five films and came to the conclusion he’s not a very good actor” (it’s worth noting that Baron Cohen was Oscar-nominated for his turn in 2020’s The Trial Of The Chicago Seven). Taylor did concede that “I thought he was an utterly brilliant subversive comedian, that’s what he’s great at”. It doesn’t sound like greeting cards between the two are regularly exchanged.

Alongside Taylor is Brian May, and he was the first to respond to Baron Cohen’s version of events, saying in 2016 that “Sacha became an arse”.  He then added in 2018 that the casting of Cohen “was a near-disaster… I think we realised just in time what a disaster it was going to be”.

The band also firmly refuted the version of the film Baron Cohen said they wanted to make, with Brian May accusing him of telling “untruths about what happened”. No script has ever leaked of the dramatically different versions of the story that were being rumoured.

Brian May, Rami Malek and Roger Taylor

By 2016 though, there was a very clear sea change of the direction of the film, with writer Anthony McCarten brought in to retool the screenplay. It was this appointment – and the casting of Rami Malek, after Ben Whishaw had been linked with the film – that got it heading towards production. And, of course, it was the far more sanitised version of the Freddie Mercury story that made it to the screen.

At the very least too, May’s commercial instincts are hard to fault. Contrast Bohemian Rhapsody with the arguably far superior Rocketman, and the former was the one that got all the money and the prizes. Rocketman, meanwhile, was a decidedly unsanitised and quite brilliant telling of Elton John’s life story, although the addressing of far darker themes cost it a family-friendly rating. Few would argue that Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury comes close to what Taron Egerton managed in the role of Elton John, but the acclaim and gongs nonetheless went to the former.

That’s not to say Bohemian Rhapsody is a bad film. It’s just it leaves behind the sense that there’s a more authoritative telling of the Freddie Mercury story out there waiting to be brought to the screen. And whilst, in the end, Sacha Baron Cohen may not have been the perfect fit for that either, his casting in the first place did suggest some intent to explore the darker edges of the story. Those hints, for better or worse, were long gone by the time the film made it to cinemas. And should the sequel project happen, don’t expect to find those edges there either…