Winning an Oscar can make you a star, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a bankable one. Rami Malek learned this after the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, the $900 million-plus blockbuster that won him the Academy Award for best actor and seemingly positioned the Mr. Robot star for a massive movie career. Since then, Malek’s track record has been mixed. He played a James Bond villain in the hugely successful No Time to Die and popped up as a nuclear physicist in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but his other projects haven’t always connected. He was part of the star-studded ensemble cast of the 1930s murder mystery Amsterdam, which earned just over $30 million worldwide despite its impressive roster. More recently, he starred opposite Russell Crowe in Nuremberg as U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who is tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders after World War II. The historical drama did respectable business, but it wasn’t exactly a massive mainstream hit.
The last time Malek took top billing was in a 2025 spy thriller that attempted to turn the unconventional actor into an equally unconventional action hero. It earned less than $100 million worldwide during its theatrical run, but more than a year later, the movie is getting another shot with audiences on streaming. The Amateur is currently the No. 2 movie on Prime Video in the U.S., according to FlixPatrol. Even more impressively, it has spent 21 days in the platform’s top 10, suggesting Malek’s latest leading role may have found the audience it struggled to reach in theaters.
What is The Amateur about?
Based on Robert Littell’s 1981 novel, The Amateur stars Malek as Charlie Heller, a brilliant but introverted CIA decoder whose wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), is killed during a terrorist attack in London. When his superiors refuse to investigate the attack, he blackmails the agency into giving him the training and resources to hunt down his wife’s killers on his own.
His character has zero field experience and struggles with the physicality of the job, but is able to rely on his intelligence to devise elaborate ways to track and take down his enemies. It’s essentially a revenge fantasy built around the idea of what would happen if the guy behind the computer had to become the action hero — an IT worker to Liam Neeson in Taken hero’s journey of sorts.
It’s a clever twist on the familiar spy-thriller formula, with Malek’s unconventional hero giving The Amateur much of its appeal, even if it wasn’t a smash hit in theaters.
What’s next for Rami Malek?
Malek took a step back from action with his latest project. He stars in Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, a musical fantasy set in late-1980s New York that premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Malek plays Jimmy George, a performance artist living with AIDS, alongside Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, Luther Ford, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
But The Amateur’s newfound popularity could make the case for Malek as an action star all over again. A year after its disappointing theatrical run, audiences are finally showing up for his unconventional take on the genre. Whether that translates into another action gig for the actor remains to be seen.
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