Sacha Baron Cohen was once lined up to play Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but the role ultimately went to Rami Malek. The choice reshaped one of the biggest music biopics of the decade and helped set up a performance that later won Malek the Academy Award for Best Actor.
The reason Cohen is back in the conversation now is simple: he remains a search magnet after a run of high-profile credits, from Borat and The Dictator to Oscar nominations for The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Against that backdrop, the Mercury role stands out as one of the most consequential parts he was attached to and did not get.
Bohemian Rhapsody became a commercial force, pulling in nearly $1 billion worldwide, and Malek’s turn as Mercury was widely praised. The film was trying to do more than string together Queen songs: it aimed to show how Freddie Mercury emerged from a shy immigrant boy into a music icon and one of the most important LGBTQ+ figures in history. Malek had already won a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series for Mr Robot shortly before he was cast, but the film turned him into an even bigger star.
Not everyone thought Cohen was the right fit. Robert Taylor, who was involved in the discussion, said he thought Cohen would have been “utter shit” and described him as pushy. Taylor also said Cohen was six inches too tall and added that after watching his last five films, he had concluded Cohen was not a very good actor. That blunt dismissal undercut the idea that Cohen simply missed out by chance, and it also explains why some Queen fans who speculated he might have won the same trophy if he had stayed with the project ran into resistance from the band members themselves.
The unresolved part is the simplest and most interesting one: the public still does not get a clean, step-by-step account of how the casting moved from Cohen to Malek. What is clear is that the swap changed the film’s fate, and it left Cohen looking like the actor who came close to one of the defining roles of the year, only to watch it become Malek’s Oscar-winning break.
