One of the more surprising, and yet in hindsight somewhat obvious, casting decisions of the year was the announcement a month or two ago that Sacha Baron Cohen would play the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in a biopic of the star, to be written by Oscar-winning writer Peter Morgan, and produced by Graham King (“The Town,” “The Departed”). Morgan’s a busy bee at the moment, with Fernando Meirelles prepping his script “360,” the thriller “Riptide” in development at Summit, possibly with Brad Pitt and Shia LaBoeuf circling, and now the MGM situation is clearing up, he should eventually get around to penning Sam Mendes’ Bond movie. But first up is Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which hits theaters Friday, as a result of which Morgan spoke to Katey Rich at Cinema Blend (via Filmonic), and spilled a couple of details on the Mercury project.
Despite Morgan’s reputation for building scripts around true-life figures like Tony Blair and David Frost, the project appears to have been conceived by Baron Cohen himself — Morgan relates that “Sacha was the one who asked me to write it. He was the guy who rang me up.” He also confirms reports that the script will focus more on the earlier years of Queen, leading up to the band’s 1985 Live Aid concert, rather than the singer’s eventual death, saying “I didn’t want to write an AIDS movie, to be honest with you. And then, I just looked at the period — it’s sort of where he rejects [the other members of Queen] and comes back to them. It’s sort of like a family movie. It’s sort of like I hate my family, I want to be independent, and then I come back.”
There’s certainly plenty of drama in this period of the band’s life — it seems likely that the narrative will include the international outcry after the band broke an anti-apartheid boycott and played gigs in South Africa, before rescuing their reputation at Live Aid, a performance frequently voted as among the all-time greats. And despite the band’s involvement in the project (the surviving members will all receive producing credits), Morgan promises it won’t be a whitewash, telling Rich “I’m not sure how much they’ll like what I write. I think they’ll recognize the truth in it, but it’s a series of painful memories for them. I’m essentially writing about the most painful time in the band’s history.”
We’re theoretically fans of Morgan’s writing (some of his best stuff is less-well-known, like “Longford” or “The Damned United”), but there’s a sense now that he may be a little thinly stretched — “The Special Relationship” was easily the weakest of the Blair trilogy, and the word on “Hereafter” isn’t great. But even so, we’ll be excited for this one when it goes before cameras sometime next year. Unless it somehow leads to a film version of the stage musical abomination “We Will Rock You”…
