After working to develop the project for years, Sacha Baron Cohen abruptly dropped out of starring in an officially sanctioned Queen biopic back in 2013. At the time, the story going around was that the band wanted to do a “PG movie” that celebrated Queen, but Cohen wanted a more “gritty” and R-rated “tell-all” that would focus on Mercury. The biopic moved forward a little bit sans Cohen, with Ben Whishaw reportedly the favorite to replace him, but other than a new writer coming on board late last year, nothing has really come of the project yet.

Now, while promoting The Brothers Grimsby, Cohen is opening up a little more about why his involvement in the film fell through. In an interview with Howard Stern (via Entertainment Weekly), Cohen reiterated that the surviving members of Queen wanted a “PG-rated look at Mercury’s legacy,” while he would’ve preferred something that “fully explored Mercury’s wild lifestyle.” It goes further than that, though, because apparently at least one member of Queen actually suggested that Mercury’s death should happen “somewhere in the middle of the movie,” with the rest of the biopic showing how the band continued on without him.

Obviously, that idea is objectively the worst, with Cohen even arguing that “not one person is going to see a movie where the lead character dies from AIDS and then you see the band carry on.” He also went on to say that “[Queen’s] Brian May is an amazing musician…but he’s not a great movie producer.” Considering how much trouble this project has had getting off the ground—even though a Freddie Mercury biopic seems like a sure-fire hit—that plot issue could be the thing that’s holding it back.

Freddie Mercury, lead singer of legendary rock band, Queen, gave the world one of the most famous and recognisable singing voices in music history. But how did he manage to achieve such vocal range?

A new study in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology set out with the ambitious task of analysing Mercury's voice. By selecting archive recordings, as well as using a rock singer to imitate, a team of Austrian, Czech and Swedish authors discovered some interesting findings about the voice once described as "a force of nature with the velocity of a hurricane."

There had been speculation that Mercury's range was over four octaves but this could not be substantiated by the study. The lead author on the study, Austrian voice scientist Christian Herbst, states that Mercury's voice range was "normal for a healthy adult -- not more, not less." Contrary to his popular image, he was probably a baritone who sang as a tenor with exceptional control over his voice production technique. He is known to have rejected an offer to sing as baritone in an opera duet with singer Montserrat Caballé because he worried that his fans knew him only as a rock singer and would not recognise his voice in baritone.

In many ways, this deeper scholarly interest and analysis of Mercury's voice moves to affirm many of the singer's stage persona traits. In particular, the study examined the intentional distortion Mercury used to produce so-called 'growl' sounds. With a rock singer imitating this special type of singing, the authors filmed his larynx with a high-speed camera at over 4,000 frames per second, giving them an understanding of what Mercury would have done physiologically while singing these 'distorted' notes. The authors could thus reconstruct how Freddie Mercury, in his flamboyant and eccentric stage persona, drove his vocal system to its limits.

What they found was an intriguing physical phenomenon called subharmonics. This is seen in a more extreme way in Tuvan throat singing where not only the vocal folds vibrate, but also a pair of tissue structures called ventricular folds, which are not normally used for speaking or classical singing. Mercury's more fragile side is also fitting with his hallmark vibrato (a rapid, slight variation in pitch). Most pop/rock singers maintain a regular vibrato, whilst his was more irregular, and unusually fast.
This deeper study into one of the world's best known vocal artists contributes not only to the scholarly understanding of voice but also to Freddie Mercury's continuing legacy.