The first time the world got a good look at Rami Malek, computer screens were reflected more often than not in his distinctive peepers. As the star of “Mr. Robot,” Sam Esmail’s zeitgeisty TV series about a psychologically damaged hacker’s fight against the billionaire class, Malek seemed a creature of zeros and ones, shrinking into the omnipresent black hoodie of the show’s protagonist, Elliot Alderson, even as his actions as a keyboard warrior shook the globe.
But in his most famous role to date, Malek rocked the world in a very different way. He earned an Oscar for his performance as the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the blockbuster rock-star biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But underneath the glitz, the glamour and the mustache, Freddie was much like Elliot: an underestimated outsider who thrust himself into the spotlight through sheer force of will.
At first glance, Malek’s new film, “The Amateur,” feels like a return to the world of digital skulduggery he inhabited in “Mr. Robot.” In this action thriller adapted from Robert Littell’s novel and directed by James Hawes, Malek stars as Charlie Heller, a C.I.A. cryptographer who takes matters into his own hands when his compromised superiors refuse to arrest the mercenaries who murdered his wife. Lacking the killer instinct to get up close and personal with his targets, he instead uses his intellectual know-how to devise a series of elaborate booby traps that take them down one by one.
But Malek sees a through line that connects all three characters: They’re outsiders who prove their doubters, including themselves, wrong. “It may be an action movie, but one of the themes is personal transformation,” Malek said. “Sometimes we go to the cinema to see someone race to a telephone booth and don a cape in order to do so. Freddie put on his own cloak onstage. Elliot famously had a hoodie. I’ve had moments of personal transformation throughout my life — we all have. For Charlie, it’s a willingness to take matters into his own hands.”
In a video call from New York, Malek talked about putting his own inimitable spin on the action hero. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Your breakout role came on “Mr. Robot.” Now here you are in front of a keyboard again. What brought you back?
If it’s a guy behind a computer screen or who feels overlooked by society or who’s disenfranchised and alienated, those characters just speak to me. I find them profoundly human. There’s a tagline for the film that I think I actually brought to our marketing team, which is that Charlie is consistently underestimated. That’s something many of us can relate to.
So from the perspective of playing a quote-unquote “action hero,” what better way to access humanity and reality than through someone who goes through life as so many across the world actually do? I have this innate willingness to venture into the fragile intersection of strength and vulnerability that characters like Elliot and Charlie are imbued with.
When you put it like that, it isn’t all that different from Freddie Mercury and his bandmates in Queen, all of whom speak about feeling like they never fit in except with one another.
I mean, in “Killer Queen,” Freddie says “fastidious and precise!” I find myself reaching toward those same adjectives for all of these characters. They’re capable of doing the extraordinary despite being underestimated. I keep going back to that word, but they’re all unwaveringly committed despite the odds against them.
There’s also a common element of self-transformation. Elliot adopts his hacker persona. Farrokh Bulsara renames himself Freddie Mercury. Charlie undergoes training and blows up his career so he can become the person he needs to be. As an actor, you become new people all the time. Is that an influence on the roles you select?
It is. It takes me back to when I was younger, extremely shy, quite the introvert, always feeling like I had to prove myself but at times wondering if there was ever a point. Fortunately I discovered a way to do that without having to aggressively do it in public. As odd as it may seem, doing it through performance was a more private way to explore that aspect of myself.
Avenging his wife is Charlie’s primary motivation, but his discovery that the C.I.A. is connected to her killers, murdering civilians and conducting false-flag operations, is nearly as big a part of his action-hero origin.
Charlie’s forcing himself to find another gear in his humanity to challenge these large organizations, these institutions we depend upon, that seem incapable of fulfilling the duties we all collectively wish and hope they do. It’s very much his critique of institutional apathy that charges him. It ignites a fire in him and he stokes it throughout the film. But he’s also lost the most radiant human being he’s ever come across, the extrovert to his introvert, the perfect soul mate. We all deal with that kind of suffering at some point. Perhaps we can discover some greater strength and power within ourselves that leads to a sense of wisdom and, at best, peace.
For all his self-transformation, Charlie is still just some guy. When he sets off an explosion, he doesn’t calmly walk away putting on sunglasses — he flinches. In his first big fight scene, he gets his butt kicked by a woman who’s nearly dying of an asthma attack at the time. That’s a different dynamic for an action hero.
Maybe one day in the future the mold will be broken, and a guy like me can play a Bond or be in a “Mission: Impossible.” But I thought that Charlie would truly have to feel like an amateur. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a gun in your hand or fired a weapon, but it’s terrifying. It’s dark and it’s cold and it’s not in the least way easy or as simple as it’s made out to be. It is harsh. It is cruel. It may imbue some people with a sense of power, but that’s not what it does for me. So those moments were not hard for me to act.
The flinching? It’s much harder to walk away from an explosion with your eyes wide open, not looking back, of course. I would love to see someone try to do it in real life. It’s an impossibility.
You have an unusual screen presence. Your demeanor is a bit twitchy and unpredictable, and your look is striking. The cinematographer of “Mr. Robot,” Tod Campbell, once told me he had to change the lenses he was shooting with to better capture the beauty of your eyes.
[Smiling] No, look, I know I’m a very unique individual. My mannerisms are unique. My speech is unique. There’s a certain flicker behind my eyes that you can’t necessarily compare to anyone else — that’s what I’ve been told, at least. The camera has an ability to capture every essence of that. Perhaps it can see too much, at times. Perhaps it’s a deficit of mine. But I’ve found a way to embrace it, and the world has too, in a way. Most importantly, it helps the outcasts, the misfits, those who feel disenfranchised or alienated or just, for lack of a better word, different, feel more at home and at peace in their own skin, behind their own unique eyes.
