Malek told the Guardian that taking the role was a "kind of the gun-to-the-head moment". "What do you do? … The scariest endeavours that I’ve chosen to take in my life have been the most fulfilling and rewarding. And this has proven to defend that equation." His rise to Oscar glory has been meteoric. Before Bohemian Rhapsody, Malek was best known for the lead role of the hit TV series Mr Robot. As "vigilante hacker" Elliot Alderson who is dealing with a social anxiety disorder, Malek starred alongside Christian Slater and won an Emmy for best actor in a drama series in 2016.
Simon Pegg was the first person I’d ever met who was as obsessed with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as I was. One evening, I was round at Simon and his pal Nick Frost’s flat for drinks when I said we should make our own zombie movie, a horror comedy. It would be from the point of view of two bit-players, two idiots who were the last to know what was going on, after waking up hungover on a Sunday morning.
Equally, though, the conceit that underlay Asterix would have been nothing without Uderzo. The challenge was to portray the age of Julius Caesar in a way that was true to the history and yet an utterly joyous recalibration of it. Brutality had to be portrayed as knockabout; a world of mud and gore and fire repainted in primary colours. Uderzo, who was colour blind, much preferred the clear line to any hint of shade, and it was that that enabled his drawings to redefine antiquity so distinctively in his own terms.