Even if Rami Malek doesn’t win an Oscar for his portrayal of killer Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the new film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he’s…
Even if Rami Malek doesn’t win an Oscar for his portrayal of killer Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the new film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he’s already copped some precious hardware for the performance: a gold pair of the prosthetic choppers he used to rock the late music legend’s distinctive overbite.
“He asked me to make a gold set for him as a momento,” says Chris Lyons of British-based Fangs FX, who created the false teeth for Malek. “They sit on a clear plastic stand, and we put ‘Freddie’ in the middle of the stand. He can actually wear them as well — his own gold Freddie teeth.”
Lyons — the go-to denture designer for the likes of Meryl Streep (“The Iron Lady,” “Into the Woods”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“The Departed,” “The Revenant”) and the “Game of Thrones” cast — has been associated with “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the early stages of the movie’s development, back when Sacha Baron Cohen was initially named to play Mercury.
Even before the project was greenlit, Lyons was helping Malek with a top-secret test set of teeth that the “Mr. Robot” star practiced with to get into character.
“I’d never met Rami, so I was working blind,” says Lyons, 55. “I didn’t know how to scale in with his face, how much to push his teeth forward, which is the whole look.”
Lyons did, however, have some experience in re-creating Mercury’s champion chompers: He’d done “Freddie teeth” in the past for Madame Tussauds wax museum and for different Mercury impersonators. “I was quite familiar with his teeth,” says Lyons.
After the production started, Lyons could really bite into the task at hand.
“We started off looking at pictures of Freddie and studying them,” says Lyons, whose prosthetic teeth were part of a cosmetic transformation that also included a nose piece, wigs and makeup. “But it wasn’t until I finally got my hands on Rami that I could actually refine the teeth down to exactly what I wanted.”
Once Malek arrived in London for his Freddie makeover, Lyons made five different sets of teeth, with the biggest being the actual life-size of Mercury. But it turned out that the largest model was a little too real for Malek.
“We scaled them down so it could fit into Rami’s face,” Lyons says, “because otherwise it would really look comical, and we didn’t want to make a caricature.”
Throughout the process, Malek — who would eventually stick with the prototype that he’d gotten comfortable with before filming — was “really into it,” says Lyons. “He wanted to feel that he had to hide the teeth [with his hands], which Freddie used to do. And because he’d been practicing with the teeth I originally made him, when it came to his speech and everything, he was absolutely spot-on perfect.”
Although in the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie credits four extra incisors for giving him greater vocal range, Lyons isn’t so sure that was the source of his toothiness.
“What he had was extra molars,” Lyons says. “Who knows? Without getting your actual hands on Freddie, it’s really hard to say for sure. At the end of the day, he just had big buck teeth.”
