For Rami Malek, Creation Is an Act of Survival

 

There are actors who arrive at Cannes armored in certainty, and then there is Rami Malek, who seems almost allergic to pretending that any of this has become ordinary. Sitting down for Kering’s Women In Motion talk in Cannes, where he appeared with The Man I Love, Malek spoke less like a movie star presenting a prestige title and more like someone still quietly astonished by the strange alchemy of cinema: the audition, the call, the script, the transformation, the red carpet, the room full of strangers waiting to feel something.

“I never get used to these moments,” Malek said, describing Cannes as something he “never, ever expected.” Even now, with an Oscar behind him and one of the most recognizable careers of his generation, he called the festival “extraordinary” and admitted the moment still felt “a bit surreal.”

That sense of awe runs through the way Malek talks about The Man I Love, a film that appears to have asked something more dangerous of him than technical transformation. The role of Jimmy, as Malek described him, was not a neatly heroic figure, nor a sanitized vessel of suffering. He was messy, vain, magnetic, needy, sensual, alive. “I fell in love with Jimmy,” Malek said. “All his contradictions.” At times, he wondered whether audiences would even like him: “He can be very selfish at times. He can be very narcissistic.”

But that, of course, seems to be the point. Malek was drawn to Jimmy not because he was easy to admire, but because he was furiously alive. He described him as a man with “a desperate need to create,” someone trying to fill each hour with art, conversation, pleasure, pride, intimacy, and performance, even as mortality shadows the edges of the story. “There is a soul in him,” Malek said, “a feeling of a desperate need to create. And that’s what keeps him alive.”

For Malek, the film’s emotional engine is not simply tragedy, but resistance. The character’s creativity becomes a form of survival, a refusal to vanish quietly. “It was a refusal, this stubborn refusal,” he said, before correcting himself slightly: “It’s just a will, a will to survive, in the world of creativity, against all odds.” There is something deeply human, he suggested, about trying to make something meaningful while time is closing in. “How much can we jam into that time that we are actually proud of?”

That question seems to have become more central to Malek’s own choices. He spoke about becoming “more considerate” about the work he takes on, not only how it will affect him, but how it might affect society. “Will they land? Will they leave an impact?” he asked. In The Man I Love, he believes the answer is yes. “I think it will resonate with many people,” he said, “people who lived in that period and beyond.”

The preparation for Jimmy was its own education. Malek described being immersed in the cultural textures of 1980s New York: films, performance artists, music, movement, subcultures, and style codes that could not be reduced to costume-board nostalgia. He learned guitar, worked on choreography, and absorbed references from Arthur Russell to the Wooster Group. “I was getting this wild education from the 1980s that I never would have had,” he said, imagining a time before everything was instantly accessible, when culture was passed hand to hand through “a cassette or a videotape” or discovered by actually being in the room.

The performance demanded a different kind of exposure from the one Malek became globally associated with in Bohemian Rhapsody. Here, the music was intimate rather than stadium-sized, raw rather than mythic. He recalled the nerves of singing live in front of people on set. After one take, he said, his shirt was soaked. “I’m not someone who usually sweats,” he admitted. “I was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is happening again.’”

There was fear in that, but also electricity. “Singing live in front of an audience, they’re hearing it for the first time, and there’s a beauty in that,” he said. “There’s a power in that.” For Malek, the imperfections mattered. Picking up a guitar and not playing it flawlessly gave the film “a particular feeling of authenticity that you don’t often see.”

The conversation also turned, inevitably, to identity. Asked about his Oscar win and the significance of becoming the first Egyptian actor to win Best Actor, Malek spoke not in triumphalist terms, but in terms of what representation can unlock for others. “One of the greatest achievements of receiving that award,” he said, was “the hope that it’s imbued in so many people all over the world, especially where my family is from in Egypt and the surrounding neighborhood countries.”

He widened the thought beyond nationality, speaking to anyone who has lived between inheritance and reinvention. “People can relate with what it feels like to be an immigrant or first generation citizen in any country,” he said. To have that accomplishment connect with others, and perhaps inspire them, fills him with a pride “greater than even doing the work itself.”

In the spirit of Women In Motion, Malek also used the moment to name the women who have shaped him. His mother came first, naturally, but he also paid tribute to the women behind the camera and behind his performances: casting directors, makeup artists, costume designers, collaborators whose influence is often less visible from the outside. He singled out makeup designer Jan Sewell as someone who brings “authorship and intelligence and architecture to a film,” adding that he can sometimes count on someone like that “in the way I can a director.” He also mentioned Ellen Mirojnick and Ruth Carter among the women who helped shape him “as a human being.”

What emerged from the talk was a portrait of an actor interested less in polish than in pulse. Malek’s Cannes conversation was about craft, certainly, but also about the charge of the unfinished thing: the trembling live performance, the flawed character, the cultural memory resurrected through detail, the artist racing time. Jimmy, as Malek described him, is not merely trying to perform. He is trying to live.