Is Rami Malek okay? The award-winning lip sync artist just takes everything so seriously, whether it’s his commitment to the Mandarin Oriental or making sure that there is no photographic proof that he was ever friends with Rachel Bilson as a teenager. Bilson revealed the latter on an episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, telling him that in 2019, she shared a high school photo of herself and Malek to support him during his Oscar campaigning for Bohemian Rhapsody, because they were “good friends” in high school: “I had posted a throwback of us from our senior trip to New York, Broadway. We were super-nerdy, just the dorkiest picture of both of us. But I throw it up ‘cause it’s funny, and I think it’s so important to be able to make fun of yourself. And he had a gold chain, and I’m like, ‘Rami where’d you get the gold chain?’ Whatever. So I’m just being funny, we were good friends.”
Bilson says that she then checked her Instagram DMs, “and I had a message from Rami. But it wasn’t like, ‘Hey! How are you?’ It was straight to, ‘I would really appreciate it if you take that down, I’m a really private person.’” Bilson was taken aback, but she adds that she’s friends with Malek’s stylist, and she said that it wasn’t “a great picture of him.” But what high school picture is, for anyone? The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz even told Bilson, “you did him dirty, he’s about to be nominated,” to which she said, “What do you mean? This was my friend, it’s a funny picture. I guess I should have found something more flattering? I don’t know. But I removed it, and I even wrote to him a really nice message, like, ‘I’m so sorry, go get the Oscar, you’re doing amazing.’ And I never hear anything back.” Wild how the guy who made this could be so self-serious.
