"I don’t recommend it for anyone," the actor said

Rami Malek has opened up about the physical toll his body went through in order to perfect his Bohemian Rhapsody role.

Malek played Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic, which was released back in October. Malek wore fake teeth to mirror Mercury’s image – but that’s not all he did to physically prepare for the role.

Speaking to The Wrap, Malek explained how he wanted to get fit enough to be able to do the famous Live Aid performance again and again.

“I didn’t really want to bulk up, per se. I just wanted to get my body into a place where I could do a 22-minute concert over and over for five days and not be out of breath,” he said.

“Well, it’s highly impossible to do that. There were days when I found myself laying on my back trying to just absorb as much air as possible.”

He put himself on a “very specific diet” and bulked up for that first week of filming. “Immediately I had to drop muscle and weight and go into shooting young Freddie, who is very scrawny,” Malek said. “I just had to be really cognisant of when to work out and when to crash diet. I don’t recommend it for anyone.”

Explaining why he took such risks, Malek replied: “To do this human being justice and to make him proud and to make Queen proud. And to have had this experience and to feel some kinship with Freddie Mercury. It means everything to me.

“I think that’s the most important takeaway from all of this – that the music and his story are going to outlive us all,” he added. “The gift of playing him is everything to me. He’s a human being who struggled so much, with every aspect of his identity, his heritage and obviously his sexual identity.

“And he found a way to be one of the boldest, most audacious, confident, spectacular, authentic, defiant human beings the world will ever know.”