Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis that he got stuck there, eventually hiring a vocal coach to help de-Elvis him. Watching a trailer for an upcoming spy movie, it occurred to me that its star was not so much Rami Malek as Rami-Malek-as-Freddie-Mercury-in-Bohemian–Rhapsody, blowing up bad guys with a camp flourish. It is a storied tradition: some say Val Kilmer needed therapy to extricate Jim Morrison from his psyche after wrapping Oliver Stone’s very bad The Doors. This is to say nothing of the mortifications of the flesh: Malek’s prosthetic Mercury teeth; the gallons of microwaved ice cream Butler had to drink to achieve Elvoid proportions. Rock history weighs like a tub of Cherry Garcia on the stomachs of the living.
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