“I remember laughing on the cop car, thinking, ‘OK, this is a very precarious situation. I may well be going to jail for something I’ve not done,'” Malek recalled of the reported arrest.
Rami Malek is opening up about a not-so-great experience he claims he had with police.
In a new profile done on the Bohemian Rhapsody actor by The Guardian, Malek claimed that he was once suspected of an alleged crime because authorities purportedly believed he “fit the description.”
“I got thrown on the bonnet [hood] of a [Los Angeles Police Department] cop car because someone had robbed a liquor store and stolen a woman’s bag,” the Oscar winner, who is Egyptian-American, alleged. “They said the [thief] was of Latin descent and, ‘You fit the description.'”
He continued, “I remember how hot that engine was, they must have been racing over there and it was almost burning my hands. My friend, who was Caucasian, was clever enough to go, ‘Actually, sir, he’s Egyptian. Not Latin.’ I remember laughing on the cop car, thinking, ‘OK, this is a very precarious situation. I may well be going to jail for something I’ve not done.'”
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Malek’s parents immigrated from Cairo before he was born, and while he did not go into further details about the alleged police incident or when it seemingly occurred, the actor did dish on some similar incidents of mistaken identity he claimed were due to his background.
“It’s difficult enough traveling. Don’t make it harder,” he told the British outlet. “I started to think, ‘What is happening?’ every time I tried to enter a country. These days, there might be a moment. Then they’ll go, ‘Nah, that’s the guy from Bohemian Rhapsody. Let him through.'”
Malek, who is perhaps best known for playing Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the Oscar-winning biopic, grew up in L.A. with his parents and twin brother Sami, with their Middle Eastern heritage always apparent to the pair.
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“I don’t know how you ever get over that. I’m what’s called ‘white-passing,’ but I have very distinctive features, and we definitely didn’t fit in,” Malek, who says he didn’t speak English until he was five or six years old, recalled. “We just had an uncanny way of sensing people. … I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse. Sometimes I find it detrimental. You can’t help it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Malek paid homage to his immigrant parents, and how hard they worked to provide for him and his twin brother and their older sister, Yasmine.
“The school system in Los Angeles was not great. She would handwrite these long letters in blue fountain pen explaining our situation. She’d say, ‘I’m going to give my kids every opportunity possible,'” Malek said of his mother who helped her sons get into private school in L.A.. “I would hear stories about her being pregnant with my brother and me, and taking three buses — three different buses — to get to work and back.”‘
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Malek, whose father died in 2006, said he’s all the more “protective” of his mother now amid the many sacrifices she made for their family, especially as the tide begins to turn on immigrants with the second presidency of Donald Trump.
“The idea that a man with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas could become president of the United States, it was one of the most hopeful moments from the story of the American dream,” Malek said of former President Barack Obama. “That’s been flipped on its head. I always look at situations like this and just hope that it brings out the absolute best in us.”
He continued, “And, yeah, at times I do feel a bit sad that [my parents] had to make this extraordinary pilgrimage to America to investigate the possibilities. And now [my mother is] dealing with, perhaps, a certain sense of repression that they may not have known had they not moved. If that makes sense.”
