Put Dr. Kelson from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple on RuPauls Drag Race
There are two periods of your life. There's before you see Ralph Fiennes absolutely devour an Iron Maiden musical number in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and there is after. And oh, how I pity anyone who's still living in the "before."
The electrifying sequence comes in the third act of Nia DaCosta's zombie banger, when Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) brings his "Fingers" to the Bone Temple for an audience with Satan, aka Old Nick. Except the devil they encounter isn't really Old Nick. It's actually Dr. Ian Kelson (Fiennes), the temple's contemplative architect.
However, Dr. Kelson is under strict orders from Jimmy to sell the illusion that he is Old Nick. If he doesn't comply, he can kiss his life goodbye. So what does Dr. Kelson do? Throws on a leather jacket; daubs charcoal all over his eyes, teeth, and bare chest; and performs the literal hell out of Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast."
We're talking singing while climbing a pyramid of bones. Pyrotechnics. Drugging your audience so they trip out while you blast your decades-old Iron Maiden vinyl across the post-apocalyptic landscape. My eyes? Peeled. My jaw? Dropped. My hands? Raised throughout the entire grand finale in preparation for the applause Kelson so richly deserved. Based on the loud whoops and cheers that followed his fiery grand finale, the audience in my screening felt the exact same way.
Masterfully executed by DaCosta and Fiennes, the scene burns with high-stakes theatricality, the same kind that makes you ask "Can they really pull this off?" during an incredibly taxing Broadway number or a particularly rocking solo at a concert. But what I really associate Kelson's level of performance with is that holy grail of entertainment: a RuPaul's Drag Race Lip Sync for Your Life.
A Lip Sync for Your Life is reality TV's best elimination challenge, one where two drag queens must perform a lip sync number on the spot — simultaneously! — in order to avoid being booted from the competition. Over the span of a single lip sync, you get everything: banger songs, dance moves to die for, all held together by the scorching tension of fighting to stay in the game.
And you know what fits the bill on all those criteria? Kelson's "The Number of the Beast" performance. Sure, he's not performing against an opponent, but he, like Drag Race's bottom two queens, is using a musical performance to avoid dire consequences. In the queens' case, that consequence is the horrible blow of being told to sashay away by RuPaul. In Kelson's case, that's the very real threat of Jimmy feeding him his own intestines. You be the judge of what's scarier.
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On top of being a literal lip sync for his life, Kelson's showstopper really is proof he'd crush Drag Race. His drag name? Old Nick, of course. When he's not lip syncing to Iron Maiden, he's turning it out to Duran Duran.
We know Old Nick's got the lip syncs covered, but his gaunt makeup and leather number prove he'd nail a design challenge. He's also got the chops to crush acting challenges: Look no further than his phony sermon to Jimmy and his Fingers. And remember Drag Race's random interior design challenges where queens had to decorate a club or a bathroom? The man built a temple out of human bones; I think he'd be fine.
But what about the reading challenge? Could the kind Kelson really muster up that much shade? No worries if not. He could just call on another Fiennes character: Cardinal Lawrence from Conclave, a film that drew several Drag Race comparisons itself.
