Writer Announced for Freddie Mercury Biopic
We know that Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen will portray Freddie Mercury in an upcoming biopic on the Queen singer. Now screenwriter Peter Morgan, who will pen the biopic, has revealed some more details about the film. It will focus on Mercury’s life, from the early days of Queen to the band’s legendary performance at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid in 1985. The movie will not examine Mercury’s final years and his AIDS-related death in 1991. “I didn’t want to write an AIDS movie, to be honest with you,” Morgan told Cinema Blend. “I just looked at the period– It’s sort of where he rejects [the other members of Queen] and comes back to them. It’s sort of like a family movie. It’s sort of like ‘I hate my family, I want to be independent, and then I come back.'”
Music Legends Portrayed on the Silver Screen
“Sacha was the one who asked me to write it. He was the guy who rang me up,” said Morgan, whose scripts for Frost/Nixon and The Queen have been nominated for Academy Awards. Producer Graham King, whose GK Films is making the new film as well as the big screen version of Jersey Boys
, recently said this to Rolling Stone: “Who doesn’t know Freddie Mercury, and who’s not going to want to know about his life? He kept his life very private. I think Peter Morgan is going to write an amazing script. What an amazing guy [Mercury was], what an amazing voice he had. Sasha fits the bill so right, all the ingredients are there.” Production on the film will begin in 2011.