Feature: Rami Malek & Indira Varma for Vogue

01.21.2025

“You know people talk about ‘chemistry’? I think it’s bollocks,” says Indira Varma. Next to her, Rami Malek nods in agreement. “I’m the same way,” he drawls, his voice all American base, thick with vocal fry. “People say, ‘We have to have a chemistry read.’ And I’ll say, ‘Listen,’”—here the actor leans in intently, as is his habit—“‘I’ll make chemistry with anyone.’ It doesn’t require you to decipher that, that’s for us to figure out.”

The pair lock eyes. They may well be right. There does seem to be something instinctive between these two relative strangers sitting in a photo studio on a dank, autumn afternoon deep in west London. Earlier, in front of the photographer’s lens, I watched as the two slipped into their respective characters with ease. The roles in question? That of Oedipus and Jocasta, doomed protagonists of Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’s ancient tragedy, which will open as simply Oedipus at The Old Vic next month in a new production codirected by the theater’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, adapted by award-winning playwright Ella Hickson.

The on-set energy is crackling away as the actors sit down for their interview in the studio’s brightly lit café. Varma, an Olivier-award-winning powerhouse, originally from Somerset, is synonymous with gold-standard theater. She has done it all: Shakespeare to Shaw; Pinter to Coward. With the straight-backed poise of a dancer, the 51-year-old is wearing a loose blue knit sweater dropping off a shoulder to reveal a strap of white tank, untamed curls continually swept over her head with her hand. Malek—a best-actor Oscar winner, for Bohemian Rhapsody, and presiding Bond villain—is Hollywood incarnate in a close-fitting white T-shirt and black jeans, recumbent in his chair (later, he catches himself quoting Marlon Brando—“Forgive me,” the 43-year-old says, “I’m not that guy”). Both nurse green teas in takeaway cups.

With rehearsals yet to begin, the two have largely been getting to know one another over the phone. “We established a camaraderie almost immediately,” says Malek, as their conversation ricochets from the play to where they studied: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for her; for him the University of Evansville, Indiana. Indira, best known on screen for playing Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones, is warm and at ease; Rami is serious, thoughtful, with a spikiness softened by a face (large pleading eyes, impossibly smooth complexion) that seems to have childlike innocence perpetually etched upon it. In Warchus’s mind, Oedipus sits somewhere between “a rock star and a lost boy.” In Malek, he points out, you get both. [More at Source]

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