Rami Malek nearly rejected his role in The Man I Love as he feared it would be compared to his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
The 45-year-old actor appears in Ira Sachs' film as gay performance artist Jimmy George but feared that many would regard the film - which is set at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York during the 1980s - as too similar to his Oscar-winning depiction of the late Queen frontman, who died due to complications from the disease in 1991 at the age of 45.
