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Sacha Baron Cohen Explains Why His Freddie Mercury Biopic Bit the Dust

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Sacha Baron Cohen (Photo: Getty Images)

Now we know why Sacha Baron Cohen’s Queen film bit the dust.

The Borat star, out promoting his new comedy The Brothers Grimsby this week, gave a rare interview as himself to Howard Stern on Tuesday. During the long talk with the shock jock, he revealed that the surviving members of the seminal British band had a very different vision for the biopic, which would have starred Cohen as the electrifying lead singer Freddie Mercury.

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“My first meeting, I should have never carried on. A member of the band said, ‘This is such a great movie, because it’s got such an amazing thing that happens in the middle of the movie… Freddie dies.’”

Mercury died of AIDS in 1991, a major moment that would serve as the climax of most conventional biopics. When presented with the band’s idea, Cohen thought that maybe they were teasing an unconventional screenplay that would nonetheless deliver a more obvious — though debauched — story. “I go, ‘All right, so it’s a bit like Pulp Fiction, where the end is the middle and the middle is the end,’” Cohen said, only to have his hopes dashed.

“We see how the band carries on from strength to strength,” Cohen recalled he was told. “I said, ‘Listen, not one person is going to see a movie where the lead character dies from AIDS and then you carry on.’”

Watch Queen’s music video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’:

Cohen tried to keep the film going, bringing on Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), whose script was rejected, and then world-class directors such as David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Tom Hooper (The Danish Girl, The King’s Speech). The band had no interest in their pitches, either. No hard feelings, though.

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“I understand it,” Mercury said. “They are a band, they want to protect their legacy as a band, and they want it to be about Queen. … At the end of the day, it really was an artistic difference.”

In November, the band found a new screenwriter, The Theory of Everything writer Anthony McCarten, to pick up the project, with Spectre and Paddington star Ben Whishaw set to play Mercury.

Watch ‘The Brothers Grimsby’ trailer: