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Queen biopic delayed again after director axed

By | Published on Tuesday 5 December 2017

Queen

The long delayed Queen biopic, now called ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, has been – well – delayed again, after the film’s director was axed from the project.

As previously reported, the Queen movie has been long mooted, with an assortment of people being linked to the project over the years. It finally went into production earlier this year with Bryan Singer of ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘X-Men’ fame directing and Rami Malek, star of US TV series ‘Mr Robot’, playing Freddie Mercury.

But production on the project was officially halted on Friday, reportedly because of the “unexpected unavailability” of Singer. Then yesterday, producers Fox stated – simply – that “Bryan Singer is no longer the director of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody'”.

There has been much chatter of late about tensions on set between Singer and his actors, in particular Malek. Indeed, rising tensions resulted in a recent confrontation between Singer and Malek, an incident some linked to the former’s dismissal.

But in a statement, the director denied that was so. He said yesterday: “Rumours that my unexpected departure from the film was sparked by a dispute I had with Rami Malek are not true. While, at times, we did have creative differences on set, Rami and I successfully put those differences behind us and continued to work on the film together until just prior to Thanksgiving”.

Singer’s departure, he said, was because producers wouldn’t allow him to take time off on health grounds, and also to care for “a gravely ill parent”. He added: “I wanted nothing more than to be able to finish this project and help honour the legacy of Freddie Mercury and Queen, but Fox would not permit me to do so because I needed to temporarily put my health, and the health of my loved ones, first”.



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