Rami Malek is having a good hair day. “This is the best his hair's been since February,” says the young woman twirling scented oil through Malek's strands while the actor stands obediently still, slightly bashful, like anyone who is being publicly oiled. His hair looks exactly the way it does in every episode of Mr. Robot, which is at the tail end of shooting its final season here in Brooklyn. The hair is worth mentioning because it has spawned a mini men's version of the Rachel, Jennifer Aniston's hair on Friends, in that it is easily identifiable and widely imitated. “It's a two on the sides that's faded to a one and a half,” says the young woman with the oil, in case anyone wants to memorize that and take it to the barber. “And it's disconnected from the top to the sides and faded up to the parietal ridge.”
“This is GQ, not National Geographic,”Malek says. “Disconnected is appropriate, though.”
It is. Malek had been acting for more than a decade when he got the part of Elliot Alderson on Mr. Robot, which came out in 2015 on USA, of all networks, and immediately generated a robust Reddit presence and an ardent audience of people for whom a dystopian but sensitive thriller felt appropriate in an age of deep fakes and flourishing conspiracies. Elliot works as a cybersecurity technician who gets embroiled in a hacktivist scheme to wrest financial justice from an evil corporation. He has a rocky relationship with humanity but a lucid one with the technological reality of the world we live in. You get the sense, in watching, that if you knew what he did, you'd microwave your SIM cards and self-medicate with morphine, too.
For three years Malek's fame gently increased as the show's influence grew. In 2016 he won an Emmy. Then he starred as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, which became the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, and he swept awards season, receiving a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, a BAFTA Award, and, of course, an Oscar, for which he gave a graceful acceptance speech that touched on his status as the son of immigrants. Next year he'll play the villain in the new James Bond movie with Daniel Craig. Descriptions of his rise often involve violent metaphors (catapulting to stardom, exploding into the zeitgeist), which is inadvertently appropriate for someone who physically falls down as much as Malek.
“I'm agile, but I trip a lot,” he says, once the oiling is completed. “Did you see when I tripped at the Oscars?” (Yes. It's on YouTube.) “Okay, here's some fresh footage of me tripping.” He moves over to a monitor and cues up a Mr. Robot scene they shot last week of Malek sprinting down a street. (Some details will be censored here to avoid spoilers.) The monitor shows Malek tripping, falling, and rolling into a pained ball. Not part of the scene. “Here's another one.” Now he's sprinting down a staircase, pursued by [redacted]. He accidentally flips and crumples at the bottom, then staggers up and continues running to finish the take. “I hope they use that one.” Then a third scene of him, darting across [redacted] and tumbling down a cliff, which was on purpose this time. “That one hurt,” he observes. He cues up a fourth scene, in which he gets hit by a car. “That one also hurt, despite the padding.” Ah, so that's how they do it—they pad the front of the car? “Yeah, although they don't pad it for the stuntman.”
A signal reaches Malek that it's time to shoot, and he ducks back into a set that I will only describe as an interior. Malek's stand-in is stationed nearby, wearing the same black pants, black shoes, and black shirt, completely indistinguishable from Malek except for the small oval of face that emerges from his hoodie.
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Requiring a stand-in was not something that occurred before Mr. Robot, when Malek's résumé was just a string of small roles in esteemed projects. In 2010 he played a Marine named Snafu in HBO's The Pacific. In 2012 he played an acolyte of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. A year later he had a tiny part in Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy, where he got murdered while solving a crossword puzzle, and a supporting role as an altruistic dweeb in Short Term 12. It looked like Malek was headed for a respectable career as a character actor—a person whose name you never quite learned but were always pleased to see for two to six minutes onscreen. A guy who, if you passed him on the street looking vaguely familiar, you might think was someone you'd met at a party instead of pegging him as a vampire of little consequence from the fifth Twilight movie.
A steady trek along this path would have been plenty for many actors, but Malek had…not so much a chip on his shoulder as a pebble in his shoe. His parents hadn't necessarily emigrated from Cairo to the U.S. in 1978 so that their future child could gamble on a career in entertainment, and Malek wasn't necessarily surrounded by a squad of cheerleaders saying Rami you can do this, it's all gonna happen. “I mean, my parents weren't exactly—they didn't love the idea of me being an actor,” he says. “They came to this country from Egypt so we could have a very successful life. They put every dollar they had into our education, and to see it being thrown into this game of risk and chance that, for many, seemed destined for failure.…” He trails off a little, thinks about how to put it. “It was not the best ending to the really trying aspect of them moving their entire lives, that upheaval from Cairo to Los Angeles to start anew.”
But even if their son's ambition was aimed at a shaky target, they could recognize the ambition as formidable. Malek spent hours stuffing envelopes with headshots and résumés to hand-deliver to agencies and film schools. One day his dad got up early and saw his son with the envelopes, and he turned to Malek's mother and said, That kid is tenacious. “I heard it and it got me emotional,” Malek says. “I couldn't turn my back—we weren't that family where I would ever show something like that. But it gave me a bit more of that grit to keep going.”
Malek's collection of blink-length roles in highly credentialed properties might have felt like torture—so close, yet so far!—but in this case it was an argument that it was better to be a small fish in a big pond than the opposite. For one thing, the bit parts offered Malek an elite form of vocational training. Sets are peculiar environments. Unlike the modern white-collar office, sets do not foster illusions about a lack of hierarchy or promote a vision of utopian cooperation with everyone contributing ideas in an open setting. Sets are more like the military. Each individual has a defined specialist role and knows exactly what is within and without his or her purview. There is a brisk formality in how people move and talk. (Malek says Copy! or Yes, sir after Mr. Robot showrunner Sam Esmail gives him direction.) This is the only way films and shows could ever get made, of course: In order for a knot of strangers to assemble and execute a complex task fast, each stranger has to plug straight into a role with no flailing or ambiguity. On a functional set, there's a mutual respect for all roles, which is memorialized in the fact that movie credits include every name, down to the junior associate's assistant's intern. “If the world collectively worked in a similar fashion to the way a film set operates, we would be much more efficient and much more considerate of one another,” Malek tells me.
All of which is to say, learning the mechanics of a set is as valuable as anything else in an actor's education. Success depends not just on talent but on knowing how to comport yourself in a power structure. “There are actors who come in and greet everyone in the morning, take everyone in,” Malek says. “And there are other actors that walk in, do the take, and get out without having said a word to anyone.” You know who's the first kind of actor? Tom Hanks. Malek learned this on the set of The Pacific, the World War II miniseries that Hanks coproduced. For his part, Hanks told me that Malek barely had to speak before he had the part: “First, there are those eyes—not like any other pair of eyes—wide and sleepy at the same time. Does the guy ever blink? Then, the physicality was exactly what we needed. He was—and is—a skinny kid. Though the Marines back then were muscled and well-fed when they invaded those Pacific Islands, three days, three weeks, two months of battle later, they were exhausted, emaciated, hollowed-out teenagers somewhere between 16 and as old as life itself. Just like Rami.”
You can't ascribe moral qualities to a person's appearance without sounding like a 4chan eugenicist, but you can draw connections between how something looks and how it makes other people feel. For example, a study recently came out that explained why dogs appear sympathetic to humans. (It's because they have eyebrow muscles: levator anguli oculi medialis.) Evidence suggests that dogs who use their eyebrow muscles are more likely to get adopted from shelters and elicit “Aww”-type sounds. Malek's equivalent are “those eyes,” as Tom Hanks pointed out. “Rami possesses a magnetism and physical presence unlike any other actor I know,” Cary Fukunaga, director of the new Bond film, added. “He has this rare ability to tap into that live wire that makes us human.”
There are other features that distinguish him from the Ryans and Chrises of Hollywood, as well. He has, for example, permanent undereye circles, which can make him look like he's carrying the weight of Society on his shoulders (Elliot) or a wrenching internal conflict (Freddie Mercury). He also has a jawline so sharp it inspired a meme implying that a person could slice her finger on it. But mostly it is his voice. The voice is deeper than expected and subtly forceful in the manner of a man who is holding a weapon that he won't use but knows is there. Sometimes it narrows into a paranoid whisper. Sometimes it crumbles like a cookie. It can be hard or soft. During his audition for Mr. Robot, Malek ran a scene in which Elliot confronts a pedophile. Most actors would take the performance in a cold and calculating and To Catch a Predator direction, but Malek did the opposite, Sam Esmail told me, giving Elliot warmth and vulnerability. “It was such a brave and unusual choice to play it that way, to show empathy for a monster instead of going for showy badassery,” Esmail said. “I think that's what's so special about Rami as an actor and a person—he's heroic without being on a pedestal.”
On the set of Mr. Robot, there are two important acronyms, both frequently deployed by Esmail. One of the acronyms is OTT and the other is TM. OTT means “over the top.” TM means “too much.” The terms are related but not synonymous. When Esmail gives the TM note, it means Let's soften that performance a bit. When he gives the OTT note, it means We are entering ridiculous territory, let's take it down 10 notches. The shorthand is a helpful barometer for fine-tuning a scene. “If we try this here, is that TM?”Esmail might ask. It is also useful in civilian life. For example, Malek's favorite clothing item on earth, which he'd shown me earlier, is a pair of vintage Levi's 510s that are objectively the perfect jeans: a true watercolor blue that is neither powdery nor oversaturated; tight-fitting but not OTT in a way that forces you to confront Malek's anatomy. Just a strong, classic pant. “They do have this, which isn't great,” he'd said, gesturing at a mark on the right inner leg that looked like brownie batter.
How did that happen?
He didn't know.
Was it chocolate?
He hoped it was chocolate.
If you can't tell, there's a Hanks-like good cheer to Malek's presence. Shooting a TV show is wild! A whole network of rooms has been constructed for just four days in this random building! “Look, this wall is fake,” Malek says, knocking a wall. “Oh, wait—this one's real.” He finds another wall and knocks. It sounds hollow. “These doors weren't here last week, either.” And that hiccuping fog machine in the corner? It is quietly responsible for the show's eerie ambience! Also, by the way, there's a toy store across the street from the building—is anyone interested in exploring it during a break? Yeah? Let's go.
Malek leads the way to the toy store, which turns out to be a wholesale-only cavern of plastic crap that feels somewhat like a money-laundering venue. “Some of these items seem less like toys than fetish objects,” Malek says while browsing the putty and slime section (it's a whole category now). Between buckets of mermaid slime and color-changing volcano slime, a Brooklyn dad approaches to ask for a photo with his tween daughter. The dad, presumably a Freddie Mercury fan, asks what Malek is doing in the neighborhood, if he's making a movie or what. “We're filming the TV show Mr. Robot. Check it out!” Malek responds. The dad is not familiar with the show. There is some overlap among Rhapsody and Robot fans, but not here.
The first question people ask when they learn you've encountered a celebrity is “What's he like?” Most celebrities have sanded their personalities to a frictionless sheen that causes all adjectives to slide off, so the answer is usually something like “Pretty nice. Has small pores.” Malek is unsanded (so far), and although he is nice and small-pored, he is also a blazing embodiment of three adjectives that become the tacit theme of every conversation, and which are worth documenting as insurance against the possibility of future frictionless-ness.
Trait one: He is prepared. Extreme preparedness is something Malek has in common with survivalists and Eagle Scouts. It manifests in ways that he thinks will be boring to readers, but I don't think it is boring that he nailed Freddie Mercury's accent by locating footage of Mercury's mother speaking in her Gujarati accent and then mastering a Gujarati accent, which sounded nothing like Mercury, and then mastering an accent that was 80 percent Gujarati and 20 percent British, which still sounded nothing like Mercury, and then mastering an accent that was half and half, which was closer, and finally working his way up to an accent that was almost entirely British but with the faintest smidge of Gujarati intonation, like 98 percent to 2 percent, and, voilà, that was Mercury. The process was a secret between Malek and his dialect coach. On the first day of shooting, a confused producer came up after the first scene and said, “I know you do an incredible Freddie accent, but it's starting to sound a little Indian.” Malek smiled to himself. “The work was there, it was underneath, and I just had to back off a bit.” TM.
To prepare for Mr. Robot, he learned about cybersecurity and read textbooks on schizophrenia and watched all the relevant TED Talks and took typing lessons for hacker verisimilitude and found a psychologist who assigned him homework. “There were times when I would go to Sam and say, ‘This doesn't quite match up for me,’ and I would have a reason why the psychology didn't feel accurate, and I would reference some book on dissociative disorder by Elyn Saks,” Malek says. Or he'd cite something the psychologist had told him during one of their many phone calls. Instead of being annoyed at Malek's conspicuous overachieving, Esmail hired the psychologist onto the show as a consultant. Re-learning to type and conducting a forensic analysis of Freddie Mercury's mom's speech patterns is a level of prep that goes far beyond, like, building lean muscle mass and dabbling in a mustache, or whatever other actors do, and the mountains of research that Malek assembles don't always map directly onto the screen. But it's all ammunition. “It is a confidence builder,” he says. “That feeling that I am equipped.”
Trait two: He is observant. “I remember always feeling like I could see people's agendas a mile away, even at five or six years old,” he says. “Do you think that's a common thing with children? Isn't that how we define who our friends are?” Maybe some children. Malek thinks his watchfulness stems from the fact that he has an identical twin brother, Sami. (Spelled like Rami but rhymes with Tammy.) As kids Rami and Sami would look at each other in any given situation and simultaneously pick up on exactly the minute detail that everyone else in the room had ignored. Malek's powers of observation waned a little in high school—possibly they were blunted by the forces of hormones and social fears—and then picked up again in his young adulthood. Here's a demonstrative anecdote. In his mid-20s, Malek was sleeping in the living room of his parents' two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, driving a beat-up Camry, and working at a restaurant while going on auditions and searching for an agent. “If I saw someone who looked in any way producer-like, because the restaurant was in the middle of Hollywood, I would stick a headshot and a résumé into their to-go order.”
How did he gauge whether someone was “producer-like”?
“I could tell if they were picking up a company order if the name said Hollywood This or Production This or Something Pictures. And then you'd see the person come in and you'd think, Oh, that's not just an assistant.” It was in their age, the way they dressed. One of these people turned out to be a guy named Frank Samuel, who gave Malek his card and told him not to abuse it. “Something to the effect of Don't pester me,” Malek says. “He laid out the terms, and I followed the terms.” Samuel gave Malek an audition for an M&M's commercial, which Malek flubbed, and which led to a brief period of feeling frozen and destroyed. But it taught him to stay alert to opportunities. To watch the door in case a person from Something Pictures walked in, and to be prepared with a spare headshot when it happened.
Which brings us to trait three. The kind of person who sneaks a folder of headshots into a commercial kitchen is a person with a certain intensity. Intense is a great quality for flavors and music and fashion, but when used as a descriptor of people, it's usually a euphemism for something bad, like “hyperactive” or “unnerving.” Malek isn't hyperactive or unnerving, but he applies the kind of focus to his work that other people apply to studying for the LSAT. When he was living at home, he kept his scripts hidden away from other eyes. “I never wrote in them,” he says. “I wanted them to have this religious quality to them. If I could put them in a special box, I would.” Being able to flip a switch and access acute concentration is a useful skill for an actor. Whether on a noisy set or in a chaotic restaurant, Malek can carve out a nook of engagement in which eye contact is direct, pauses are thoughtful, and sentences are complete. Maybe every interaction was like this before the internet existed.
Or maybe, another theory: The focus is also related to the twinship. As children, Rami and Sami were constantly mistaken for each other. When you grow up as an identical twin, the whole world conditions you to see yourself as—literally!—interchangeable. Surely this forces a person to have a healthily low ego from a young age, no? And if you're not constantly fixating on yourself, you learn to focus on everything else, right? “I'm pretty good in that respect, but who wouldn't say that?” Malek says. “Who's going to admit that they're egotistical?”
Anyway, if fame was going to spoil Rami Malek, it would have happened already. To date Bohemian Rhapsody is Fox's third-biggest movie after Avatar and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. In Europe, a territory naturally rich in Queen fans, it was last year's number one release in 13 nations. In a period of weeks, Malek's global recognizability went from a mellow buzz to a full-blown psychedelic trip. Imagine that you woke up one day with your usual morning breath and customary bed head and left your apartment to discover that nobody looked at you the same way and all of your interactions were altered and strangers texted their friends when you walked past on the street. And random ladies groped you. The other day, Malek was going about his business when an inebriated woman suddenly “had her hands all over my butt.” He politely turned to the groper and said, “Can you not?” Even if you're able to posit the causal link between winning an Oscar and being fondled by a drunk lady, it's still a sequence that doesn't track. “People's perception might be altered, but when you sit down and talk to me, there's nothing that's mystifying. I'm not fucking covered in gold,” he says.
Malek is at a peculiar point in his fame trajectory: He hasn't fully exited the reality of normal people and entered the new stasis of celebrity. In practice this means he is still conversationally accessible, still enters interactions instead of “managing” them, is still surprised when strangers gawk, and still says things that would make his agent's head explode and then wonders out loud whether those things should be on or off the record.
When Malek was developing his role as Elliot, he practiced going undetected in public spaces. He clocked where the cameras were in every restaurant and elevator and store he entered. He wore all gray or all black, to be indecipherable from the pavement. He walked head down with his body hugging whatever wall or building was nearest, to avoid at least one side of having any human contact. These days, in the thick of new ultra-fame, he will find himself walking around New York City in Elliot invisibility mode, hugging surfaces in a hoodie, which strikes him as slightly sad but mostly funny. To avoid being recognized, the actor now mimics one of the characters that made him recognizable. And it works!
After lunch one day, he walks outside, unnoticed, and spots a Goop store nearby.
“Is that related to Gwyneth Paltrow?” he asks.
Yes. (“Related.”)
Malek discovers a lot of places by poking his head in. If he's walking somewhere, time needs to be factored in for poking. Today he has the idea to go inside Goop and see if he can find a gift for his girlfriend, Lucy Boynton, who costarred with him in Bohemian Rhapsody. No special occasion, just a token of appreciation. We enter the store, which is stocked with superpowders and calming mists. Immediately Malek's girlfriend meter is beeping. He definitely thinks he can find something in here for her.
“How about these?” he asks, examining a set of Champagne coupes. It's always nice to have a gift they can share and enjoy together, he reasons, though it might be annoying to carry delicate glassware around town until he sees her later.
Is Lucy a bath taker? I ask.
“She's British, so all she takes is baths.”
How about a 24-ounce sack of “soak” formulated according to both Eastern and Western herbal traditions?
“What is it, bath salts?”
Yes, it contains “pharmaceutical-grade” Epsom salts. On the downside, it's nearly as big as the Champagne coupes.
“Yeah, I might not want to carry that around, either.”
He moves into a section of exclusive deodorants, and I recognize a container of Schmidt's Jasmine Tea deodorant.
“Smell this smell,” I say, unsheathing the tester. “It's a deodorant, but it smells so good I would wear it as a perfume.”
He smells. He likes. A thought takes hold.
“Actually, she wants deodorant. Does it have aluminum in it?”
Obviously not. This is Goop, baby.
He selects a fresh tube of deodorant and slides it into his jacket pocket, then makes eye contact with a salesperson mid-slide. “Oh, I realize how this looks. I'm just seeing if it will fit into my pocket so I can carry it around.”
“We can hold on to that for you,” the salesperson suggests.
Malek is pleased with the deodorant. “She'll be so ‘chuffed,’ ” he says, sticking the word in air quotes. It's a Britishism that he harvested from London and continues to find useful.
Next he winds into the store's jewelry section, skipping over a ring embossed with the word karma (whew) and zeroing in on a gold chain, no wider than spider's silk, with a crescent-shaped pendant. The word for it is lovely. Necklace approved.
Then another idea strikes. Malek asks the salesperson to take the deodorant and wrap it painstakingly in black cloth in a jewelry box and then to throw the necklace into a deceptively informal Goop shopping bag. That way, when Lucy opens the deodorant, she'll think she's being mildly punked, and then he'll hit her with the hidden necklace.
“Do you think this gift requires a card?” he wonders aloud.
No, I think it's cooler if it's just a random “thinking of you” gift.
“I agree. Is this boring for you?”
What, running errands with Academy Award® winner Rami Malek? No. Anyway, nothing is more fun than colluding on gifts for someone, especially when I'm not paying for the gifts.
“Good. This will be funny. She'll think I'm being goofy.”
Mission accomplished. He leaves the store and heads north. Lucy is at a restaurant on the west side; the plan is to walk across town and meet her there with the presents. Malek swings the bag in hand. The sun is shining. He is upbeat.
“Hollywood gets this rap of a lot of lascivious, nasty things that take place within the confines of preproduction to postproduction and studios and agents and whatnot,” he had said earlier.
It can be a bleak zone of rejection and slammed doors, a place where months of spamming people with headshots gets you a single M&M's audition, which you proceed to blow. But there are outrageous moments of fortune, too, like getting cast as Freddie Mercury, and there are fine people to emulate, like Tom Hanks, and people to fall in love with, like Lucy, and so Malek sums up his theory of the business like this: “If you can find any type of happiness in it, latch on.”
Molly Young is a contributing writer for ‘The New York Times Magazine’ and a frequent contributor to GQ.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue with the title "An Overnight Sensation 15 Years in the Making."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan McGinley
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Thomas Dunkin using Sebastian Professional
Grooming by Cheri Keating using Dior
Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions
