From an underdog to an Academy Award winner, Rami Malek’s life is an endearing tale of struggle, hope and success. And the story continues to grow in leaps and bounds as directors get busy working on scripts that have him in the lead. A part of his story is, indeed, being written, as he mentioned in his acceptance speech. He’d said “I am the son of immigrants from Egypt. I am a first generation American, and part of my story is being written right now and I could not be more grateful.”
Born on May 12, 1981 in Los Angeles, to Said Malek and Nelly Abdel-Malek who’d left Cairo in 1978, Rami Malek grew up speaking colloquial Egyptian Arabic at home. He recalls having difficulties assimilating the cultural differences that came his way as a first generation American. “I used to spend a lot of time alone as a kid, creating characters and doing voices in my room, and I thought to myself, I’m either going to go absolutely nuts, or I’m going to find something to put that energy into,” he’s quoted to have said. Apparently, he followed the latter and the world knows about it now. After his graduation from the University of Evansville with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, Rami Malek began his acting career in 2004 with a guest-starring role in the TV series Gilmore Girls.
It was in 2005 that he got his Screen Actors Guild card for his work on the Steven Bochco war drama ‘Over There’ and was cast as Kenny, on the Fox comedy series ‘The War at Home’. He got his feature film break in 2006 as Pharaoh Ahkmenrah in the ‘Night at the Museum’ and reprised his role in the following two sequels.
In 2015, he got the lead role in ‘Mr. Robot’, the psychological thriller television series, in which he plays the role of a cyber-security engineer and hacker. That role has earned him nominations for the Dorian Award, Satellite Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as wins in the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series and Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
In 2016, he got a starring role in the film ‘Buster’s Mal Heart’, in which he played one man with two lives – Jonah and Buster, and also co-starred in a contemporary remake of the 1973 film Papillon; it premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. And then in 2016 November, Malek was signed up to star as Freddie Mercury in the upcoming Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, for which he has won the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and British Academy Film Award for Best Actor. Looking back, Malek is quoted to have said, “I may not have been the obvious choice, but I guess it worked out.”