Rami Malek on the challenges of Nuremberg and working with Russell Crowe

Before he won an Oscar playing Freddie Mercury, before his break-out role in Mr Robot, Rami Malek was a young actor on a shoot in Australia for The Pacific.

The 10-episode HBO World War II epic was committed to detail, and was an immersive experience for the audience, but even more so, it seems, for its actors.

Malek’s character, based on the real-life soldier Merriell Shelton, was reaching into the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers to extract gold out of their teeth. He found himself overwhelmed by the moment.

“The prosthetics team had done such an incredible job at recreating the jarring dead bodies that after about seven or eight takes, I found myself crying, and my character would not have been,” he recalled to The Nightly.

“There was no use to (keep filming because) it was just too visceral and painful. I felt it was a good lesson because it allowed me as a young actor to know that I could establish boundaries for myself.”

Fifteen years later, Malek found himself again dissociating from the character he had embodied. He was on the set of his latest film, Nuremberg, a historical drama about the challenges of establishing the unprecedented international trials to deal with surviving Nazis in the aftermath of World War II.

He was playing another real-life person, Douglas Kelley, a US army psychiatrist who was brought on board during the process to assess the captured Nazis, including the high-ranking Hermann Goring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command.

During the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution showed reels of footage taken inside concentration camps, one of the first times in history that film had been submitted as evidence. The footage was distressing and graphic, laying bare the full horrors of the Third Reich’s depraved treatment of human beings.

Nuremberg director James Vanderbilt didn’t want his cast to watch that footage until the day they were shooting the scene in which the courtroom was confronted with those images.

“The impact was pretty indelible,” Malek said. “It remains etched in my mind.

“Though the nature of the crimes were generally understood, it wasn’t until people in the courtroom and worldwide saw that footage that made it irrefutably real.”

After repeated takes, Malek had “reached my limit of what I think my soul could take in that moment.

“Usually, in the moment the camera is rolling, I try to displace myself from any idea that we’re making a movie, but, at that point, I started to remove myself because it became too difficult to watch”.

Malek recalled that he started to cast his energy forward, thinking about the next scene in the sequence, and how he could harness his own feeling of great unease to how his character would feel when Doug is back in the room with Goring.

Nuremberg has two parallel and intersecting storylines – the establishment of an international court outside of any existing jurisdiction and the Clarice Starling/Hannibal Lecter-esque back-and-forth exchanges between Goring and Doug.

Doug is trying to understand the human capacity for “evil”, but at the same time, he is magnetised by Goring’s charisma. That it works, that the audience could even brook the idea that this Nazi leader is someone capable of charm is down in part to Russell Crowe’s performance, and the dynamic between him and Malek.

Those tete-a-tetes in the interrogation room or Goring’s cell anchors the film’s emotional throughline as Doug reckons with his thoughts and feelings about the man before him.

Vanderbilt adapted the film from Jack El-Hai’s book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which drew a lot from Kelley’s book he wrote from his experiences.

“(Kelley) would say things of how complex, smart, articulate, witty and charming (Goring) would be, and his connection to his family, and reading that on its own, if you remove certain aspects of his political standpoint, you could see how complicated it must have been for Kelley to not form some type of affinity to this person,” Malek explained.

“Though, presented with the evidence, of course, he had to (question that). (Kelley) was a very, very complex character dealing with an incredibly manipulative, persuasive and charming human being.”

When Malek signed up, Crowe had already been attached to Nuremberg for some time, and he recalled that after their first day on set, Crowe approached him and told him that he was happy with Malek’s work.

“He was happy with what I was delivering, and that I was bringing something to it that he hadn’t seen,” he said. “So me, of course, being cynical in a way, I was like, ‘is he trying to lift (me up) so that I could take on the challenge or was he properly complimenting my work?’

“We’re actors, we probably spiral and investigate far too much.”

Malek described working with Crowe as “intoxicating”, that every day they both marshalled everything they had to create the unusual relationship between these two men. They were times when the two were face-to-face and he could feel his heart pounding.

“There was an exciting feeling to doing those scenes with him in the cells,” he explained. “We also chose not to remove any of the walls from the cells, so it became more claustrophobic, having the cameras inside, all the sound and camera equipment, and it was almost suffocating.”

Malek had high praise for his co-star, calling Crowe’s performance a “tour de force”. It’s also a performance from himself of which he is proud, one he ranks as “high up there”. It’s the tandem of the two that works in symphony.

“It’s something I’m going to look back on very fondly at what we were both able to achieve together.”

This year was the 80th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials, a collaborative process between the UK, the US, France and the Soviet Union. The task was not small, and it set principles of international justice we still use today.

Eight decades on, the world is still contending with crimes against humanity committed by nation states or groups, actions that defy common decency and shared international values.

A film such as Nuremberg triggers questions about if we’re still stuck in the same cycles of violence and hatred that have plagued people throughout history.

As much as it, and every movie, seeks to entertain and enthral, there is that other layer to Nuremberg which asks audiences to consider how horrors repeat and how we confront them.

“It is a very devastating, tumultuous time in the world right now, and one that breaks all of our hearts on a deep level. Or hopefully, most of our hearts. We’re trying to wrap our heads around it and grapple with it,” Malek said.

“When I think of this film, yes, it’s a courtroom drama, but at its heart, it’s a story about people faced with the weight of history trying to do right when the odds seem impossible.

“It’s about moral courage and what it means to speak truth to power. It’s both intimate and it’s epic, and it’s a story about a handful of voices that change the way we look at and think about justice.

“Is it a movie about right now? Yes. Is it a movie for any period in time? Absolutely.”

Nuremberg is in cinemas