While Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) is leafing through a phone book to find Jim Hutton’s phone number, we can see a Taylor of Old Bond Street box on the marble counter beside him. It’s impossible to tell what product it contained, but I appreciate the choice of the prop master.

Phoebe Freestone, Freddie’s personal assistant, has given a thorough description of the singer’s perfume habits: “In the early 80s there were two standard colognes with him wherever he went, Aramis and Lagerfeld. He did try others occasionally but always reverted back to those. Later, when he was spending more time in Switzerland, he discovered L’Eau Dynamisante by Clarins which he wore much of the time. There was always a surprise in all the bathrooms he had, whether in England, New York or Munich and that was a ladies fragrance called L’Interdit, created for Audrey Hepburn by Givenchy. His drawers always had bars of soap in them to keep the clothes smelling good and those were by Roger & Gallet.” There’s no mention of traditional fragrances like those by Taylor of Old Bond Street, so I guess that specific box was chosen purely for decorative/aesthetic reasons.