When it was first revealed that Sacha Baron Cohen was being eyed to play Freddie Mercury, excitement from fans of Queen was at an all-time high. After all, despite quite crude performances in movies like Borat and Bruno, Cohen is a tremendous actor who could have done great work with this role. Unfortunately, creative differences mean it won’t happen.

Up until now though, we’ve had no idea what those differences were, but Cohen has finally shed some light on why exactly he ultimately decided to part ways with the band.

“[After] my first meeting, I should never have carried on because a member of the band —I won’t say who— said, ‘This is such a great movie, because such an amazing thing happens in the middle of the movie.’ I go, ‘What happens in the middle of the movie?’ He goes, ‘Freddie dies.’ I go, ‘So you mean it’s a bit like ‘Pulp Fiction,’ where the end is the middle and the middle is the end? That’s interesting.’ He goes, ‘No no no.’ So I said, ‘Wait a minute. What happens in the second half of the movie?’ And he said, ‘Well, we see how the band carries on from strength to strength.’ And I said, ‘Listen, not one person is going to see a movie where the lead character dies from AIDS and then you carry on to see [what happens to the band].”

“They asked me to write the movie, but I said, ‘I don’t know how to write a biopic,'” the actor continued. “So I got in Peter Morgan (The Queen), [but] they didn’t like that. I brought in David Fincher who wanted to direct it, then Tom Hooper—they were very specific about how they wanted to do it. But at the end of the day, it really was an artistic difference.”

Alas, it sounds like the surviving members of Queen want to turn this biopic into a vanity project showing how well THEY have done since the death of the band’s frontman. Cohen bringing the likes of Hooper and Fincher to them really should have sealed the deal, but if even their involvement wasn’t good enough, who knows what will happen to this biopic…