James Bond star Ben Whishaw is Queen’s choice to play Freddie Mercury in the upcoming biopic, according to the band’s drummer Roger Taylor.
Speaking on the BBC’s One Show, Taylor remarked that the actor the band would prefer had the initials “BW”, and when asked if that meant Whishaw, he replied: “Well, we hope so.”
The revelation comes at the same time as Queen guitarist Brian May’s expanded on the reasons why Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor originally attached to play Mercury, left the project. Speaking to Classic Rock magazine, May said “we felt that his presence in the movie would be very distracting”.
May went on to say: “What led us to that conclusion was the last three movies that [Baron Cohen has] made – The Dictator, Les Miserables and Hugo – in which he makes outstanding performances, but they’re very much Sacha Baron Cohen performances. And we thought there has to be no distraction in the Freddie movie. You have to really suspend that disbelief – the man who plays Freddie, you have to really believe is Freddie. And we didn’t that could really happen with Sacha.”
