A person shouldn’t be able to “play” Elton John. That’s the whole point of Elton John being Elton John. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime—hell, probably once ever—beamed-from-another-planet personality, talent, raconteur, and renegade. His essence is as if a kaleidoscope exploded into a person: trippy, messy, hypnotizing, bright, garish, and altogether unique and fabulous.
Another mere mortal can’t capture that. It would be a pale imitation, bad drag, or “a valiant effort” at best. How, then, to explain what Taron Egerton accomplishes in Rocketman?
The actor apologizes for the rasp in his voice—“a result of a really great weekend” in which he celebrated his 30th birthday—when we meet in New York ahead of award-season campaigning for his work in the film, which just this week garnered him Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, and solid footing in a turbulent Best Actor Oscars race.
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That we’re still talking about his performance is both a testament to his work and a feat of longevity.
Rocketman, the “musical fantasy,” as it was billed, about Elton John’s early career and struggles with addiction and sexuality, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May—which might as well have been last century in award voters’ recency-biased minds. When factoring in rehearsals, filming, recording the soundtrack at Abbey Road, and spending time living with and getting to know the icon and his husband, David Furnish, the last three years of Egerton’s life have been spent in the headspace of Elton John.
Then there’s the specter of Bohemian Rhapsody to talk through. Egerton is thankful that his film’s approach to Elton John’s life stood in such stark relief to last year’s Oscar winner’s approach to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. “Fucking hell, if we were doing the same thing, that would have been a miserable film to come after, because it was such a behemoth.”
He enjoys talking about the experience now, with enough remove from the cannon-blast of press when the film premiered. He has more insight into the scrutiny and, ultimately, celebration the film received from the gay community, the impact it had on addicts and those in recovery, and how the experience of making the movie and channeling Elton has shaped him.
“Memories mature like wine, don’t they?” he says. “It’s been six months but I’m already a little nostalgic. It’s feeling a little sugar-coated—although it was already pretty sugar-coated at the time.”
There’s a bit of a wince when he jokes about “the big, scary birthday” and turning 30. “It’s the first milestone where you feel like you’ve lost something,” he says. “When you get to the end of your teens, you’re not like, ‘That’s the end of my teens!’ You’re like, ‘Yeah! Here come my twenties!’ But at the end of your twenties, you sort of go, ‘Oh fuck. That was my twenties. It’s sort of done. I’ve had that.’”
Being feted by major awards organizations for Rocketman should liven up the mourning.
Taron Egerton shouldn’t have been this good in the movie. Or, frankly, been in it at all.
The Kingsman movies and Robin Hood star was just 18 when John first started developing a film about his life. Tom Hardy was going to play the part, until too much time passed, Hardy got too old, and the pesky detail that Hardy could not, in fact, sing became too glaring to ignore.
In Hollywood, there’s always serendipity. Or, at the very least, amusing coincidences that can be retrofitted to make it seem as if certain things were written in the stars.
For example, when Egerton was 17, around the time that John was first exploring the idea of a movie, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London with “Your Song.” He sang a John tune again later in his career, this time as a gorilla in the 2016 animated film Sing, in which his character performs “I’m Still Standing” at the concert finale. A year later, John made a cameo in Egerton’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle movie.
Director-producer Matthew Vaughn was editing Kingsman: The Golden Circle when Furnish mentioned that the couple was having a hard time getting a film about John off the ground, with studios giving feedback variations of “too expensive” or “too gritty” as the project sat in gestation.
To Vaughn, the movie was a no-brainer. He jumped in to produce, drafted Dexter Fletcher—the man who would eventually take over Bohemian Rhapsody helming duties from Bryan Singer—to direct, and suggested his Kingsman star to take over as John.
"Taron Egerton plays Elton John in Rocketman from Paramount Pictures."
David Appleby/Paramount Pictures“When I saw Taron, I was not looking at him, I was looking at me,” John told guild members after a screening this fall. “And when I was hearing his voice, I was hearing me, but it wasn’t me. Everything about it was extraordinary.”
It was last February when Egerton first went to Abbey Road with John and recorded early test versions of “Your Song” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” The film was still very much in development, even at the script level, and at that point it was important to Egerton to try and make his voice sound as much like John’s as possible. Given how biopics typically go, that was a reasonable pressure to put on himself. John put the kibosh on that immediately.
“I think he wanted us to do something impressionistic rather than photographic,” Egerton says. “There’s a version of this where we could have made that our central aim, to sound as much like and emulate his mannerisms as effectively as possible. I would argue it would not have felt quite as effectively.”
The film takes place over the course of four decades, with Egerton painting a gap onto his teeth and shaving back his hairline with a razor to mimic John’s pattern baldness as he aged. And there’s the costumes. The film begins with Elton John bursting through the door of a recovery meeting in a flaming-red bodysuit with flared bell bottoms, a headpiece with devil horns, heart-shaped sunglasses, and a pair of massive wings looming behind him, a preview of the runway of campy, glam-rock couture to come in the film—all perfect homages to the many looks sported by John over the years.
But then the film leaves reality.
Egerton is performing “Crocodile Rock” when he, the piano, and the entire concert crowd begin to levitate. “Rocketman” begins with him singing underwater at the bottom of a pool, where he would remain with a dive team for up to 20 minutes between takes of him trying to sing without water shooting up his nose. “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” is an old-school production number performed by a massive ensemble at a 1950s carnival. And the film starts with a duet of “The Bitch Is Back” performed by Egerton’s John and his younger self, Reggie Dwight from Pinner, played by Matthew Illesley.
“The most important thing is that it’s a musical,” says director Dexter Fletcher, who arrives to our interview singing a song from Little Shop of Horrors. “It’s not a biopic. It’s not any other description you want to give it. It’s like Little Shop of Horrors, a fucking plant comes down from outer space and ends up eating people and singing, but there’s something very real and relatable about it still. That’s what a musical gives us beyond all other forms.”
Of course, “R-rated musical” doesn’t necessarily have the cha-ching ring of dollar signs to it. Especially when detonating the entire formula that turned Bohemian Rhapsody into a $900 million-grossing, Oscar-winning cultural phenomenon, backlash from critics be damned.
The comparisons between the two films were inevitable, considering both centered on the lives of gay ’70s British rock icons and were released so close together; Rocketman’s Cannes premiere came less than three months after Rami Malek wrapped up his Oscars speech for playing Freddie Mercury. The fact that Fletcher stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody once Bryan Singer was fired from the set tied the films closer together.
Fletcher has gone on record saying that, while he made sure to do the best job he could in the stressful and rushed Bohemian Rhapsody situation, he “was not emotionally attached to it.”
While the obvious comparisons would be potentially frustrating for Rocketman promotion—the mention of Bohemian Rhapsody’s shadow is the only time Egerton lets out a beleaguered sigh: “Yeah… that…”—the film was in other ways absolved for not being like Bohemian Rhapsody, really, at all.
It was not a by-the-numbers biopic with a mimic lead performance. It did not sanitize its subject’s sexuality and legacy or play down any of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll in order to appease studios and make the film more palatable for a mainstream audience. Its lead star—insert shady eyes emoji—is heard doing his own singing in the final film version.
“We always knew, just by virtue of the fact that it’s a musical, that it was going to be a different animal,” Egerton says. Which was important, Fletcher says, because the last thing they wanted to be was “The Also-Ran Rocketman.”
There were still liabilities to following Bohemian Rhapsody so closely—specifically, the aftermath of outrage at the ways the film not only blushed at the idea of showing Mercury in the throes of passion with other men but treated his sexuality as a predatory gateway drug to a destructive lifestyle.
It would seem absurd to expect the same thing from a movie about John’s life that includes the phrase, “I have fucked everything that moves.” John himself has said the reason it took so long for the film to materialize was because he refused to water down his life. “Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating,” John wrote in The Guardian. “But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life.”
Yet Bohemian Rhapsody grossed that much money, and won that many awards. The gay community has been burned so many times before by LGBTQ+ movie representation that they’re practically calloused. It didn’t require a cynical bent to expect it to happen again with Rocketman.
Egerton himself has admitted that he feared the intimate scenes between himself and Richard Madden, who plays John’s former lover and manager John Reid, would be edited out, as is common with studio films.
So when there were reports that Paramount was considering cutting down or excising that love scene, the first in a studio movie pitched at a mass audience, the reaction was livid. You could hear the sighs of relief back in Hollywood when the audience at the Cannes premiere saw that the gay sex and fleeting bare bums made it into the film intact.
“We wanted the LGBTQ community to feel a sense of ownership over the film and be championed by it,” Egerton says, explaining that he completely understood the scrutiny those aspects of the film were under and the fears the final cut would need to address. “We are, sure, celebrating a pop star’s life, but we are also celebrating a standard bearer of that community’s life. Scrutiny is going to be a part of that.”
Fletcher explains that for the sequence the Egerton-Madden love scene appears in, he had also filmed a sex scene between Jamie Bell’s Bernie Taupin and Sharmina Harrower’s Heather, to show John and Taupin on parallel rock-star journeys to sexual freedom. The studio nixed that part of the sequence before even mentioning that the gay sex scene might have gone on for too long.
“But we stuck our flag in the sand,” the director says. “There are things in history and his personal life that we are going to address, and that does mean he might kiss a man. You have got your big company logo at the front of that and you have to reconcile yourself with that, because the issues are yours, not ours.”
If any of this was considered a gamble, it seems to be paying off. The film grossed $195 million worldwide on a budget of $40 million, and has so far scored major nominations at the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and Critics Choice Awards. Egerton is in the same Oscars conversation as the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Adam Driver, Leonardo DiCaprio, Antonio Banderas, Christian Bale, and Eddie Murphy, hoping to score his first nomination.
Maybe that’s a testament to Rocketman producing something very Elton John, which is to say audacious and proudly weird, in the spirit of what Egerton thinks might be the best lesson he’s learned from the idol who has, in the twist of his life thus far, become a close friend.
“There’s this phrase that I’m going to paraphrase: ‘Bored people are boring and interesting people are really fucking interested,’” he says. “Elton is quite interested in the world around him, and there’s something quite infectious about that. I caught a touch of that.”
