All-Star Team Assembles For Sacha Baron Cohen To Bring Freddie Mercury To Big Screen

There's no denying the mark Freddie Mercury and Queen left on rock and roll. Their song catalog reads like a menu of the great rock anthems: "We Are The Champions," "Bohemian Rhapsody," "We Will Rock You," and "Another One Bites the Dust" have all been sung by crowds of tens of thousands in stadiums and have graced countless climactic scenes in movies.

And Mercury brought a theatricality to rock music that was rarely seen and only matched by his vocal range and talent.

But while numerous specials and documentaries have been done about his life, no one has tried to grasp the enormity of the spectacle of Freddie Mercury and make a biopic. Until now.

The surviving members of Queen Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon have licensed the songs and the band's image for a new movie, to be written by Peter Morgan, who brought usFrost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, and The Queen. The film is being jointly produced by the band, along with Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions. 

The film will cover the band's formative years up through Queen's appearance at Live Aid in 1985, which a 2005 BBC poll crowned the "greatest live gig ever." It will not focus on Mercury's final years, leading up to his death in 1991 of complications from AIDS, which did much to remove the stigma from AIDS. Mercury was one of the earliest examples of the "open closet" he was never out, but he didn't go to great lengths to hide that he was bisexual, even if he would never directly answer the question.

Casting Freddie Mercury has been long thought to be impossible. Her genetic heritage alone is daunting for a still mostly white Hollywood as the singer was Parsi, born in Zanzibar, and raised mostly in India. This production will rely on Sacha Baron Cohen to portray the rock god. Despite dissimilar heritage, there's no denying the physical resemblance of the two stars.

It's not known if Cohen will sing, or lipsynch to original tracks. While many have tried, no one really matched his four octave range melded with an uncanny emotional control. Cohen's physicality will serve him well with Cohen likely having the stage presence necessary to pull off Mercury who owned an arena stage like no one before him.

Now we just have to see if Cohen best known for his satirical roles in Borat and Bruno can pull off what might be the most challenging role of his career.