Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford said his band’s story would make a great Hollywood biopic, following the success of the Queen movie Bohemian Rhapsody.

The singer also confirmed he was working on his memoir, despite having said in the past that he’d never write one.

“I think Judas Priest has had a very interesting life,” Halford told Stuff in a new interview. “We’ve certainly got some stories to tell. We’ve certainly had a lot of incidents on the road, that’s for sure. ... I also had to hide a gay guy like Freddie [Mercury] for all those years.”  Halford publicly confirmed his sexuality in 1998, after years of worrying that metal fans wouldn’t accept him.

He also heaped praise on Rami Malek for his Oscar-winning depiction of Mercury, while discussing the question of who might star in a Priest movie. “Who could be the metal god? I haven’t got a clue,” he admitted. “I thought Rami did a fantastic job of Freddie’s persona, charisma. But I’m sure there’s another actor out there who could get the leather and whips and chains on.”

Last year Halford said he was ready to tell his story in a book, even though he felt in the past that his privacy was too important to him to write about his life.

“It’s been rattling round in my head for ever,” he noted in the new interview. “As you move on in life and have had the wonderful good luck, fortune and gratefulness to spend 50 years in a glorious band like Judas Priest, the main thing is you want to be to tell your side of the story from the horse's mouth, as opposed to something that has been knocked up by somebody else from a bunch of interviews and so forth.”

He predicted his story would “end up like The Lord of the Rings. ... Between my early childhood, adolescent years and the place where I'm at now, I think we're talking about three heavy metal tomes.”

The 2001 Mark Wahlberg movie Rock Star was loosely based on the story of Tim "Ripper" Owens, who replaced Halford as Judas Priest's singer from 1996-2003. He was chosen for the job after the band saw him perform its music with a tribute group named British Steel.

 

 

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