King Tut

Daphne Barak from the UK’s ‘The Daily Express’ in New York interviewed Michael recently.

The following are extracts from the piece;

Michael has a new mission in life; he wants to make a film about the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen, with himself in the starring role.

“I want to play King Tut, it’s a beautiful story that not many people know,” he told me exclusively in New York. I want to play him because I feel connected to him. There is so much to learn from him and his short life.”

You can see why the story attracts Michael; heaps of treasure, pomp and ceremony, and palace intrigue – there is a theory that Tutankhamen, who died in 1327 BC at the age of 18 after nine years as king, was murdered by an ambitious courtier, named Ay, who succeeded him as pharaoh. All this is meat and drink to the man with a taste for the ultra-fantastic, and who recreated Disneyland at Neverland, his California home. There is even a passing resemblance between Michael – now aged 41.*

Michael revealed his latest ambition as we spoke in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. He was dressed in a black jumpsuit.

Michael does, however, claim to have had a warm, confessional relationship with the late, Diana Princess of Wales. “We were very close, especially over the phone… “

Michael clearly identifies with Diana in that he see himself, like the Princess, as a victim of the media.

“The media has been cruel to me,” he insisted. “They twist everything. How could they say all those bad stories about me? They don’t even know about all my charity work and donations.

There was this woman in America who killed her children – it was a case, which shocked this country. No one knows who paid for the funeral. Well, I did! And that was never published. I didn’t do it for publicity. I did it because I cared about the children. I couldn’t sleep for whole nights after the murders happened. But I don’t bother to fight the bad stories because, whatever I do, they’ll twist it and say: Michael has done another weird thing.”

*Extra info’: Tutankhamen’s mask, made of solid gold, was placed directly upon the pharaoh’s mummy, and had the function of magically protecting him. This beautiful object weighs 10 kg (24 lbs) and is decorated with semiprecious stones (turquoise, cornelian and lapis lazuli) and coloured glass paste.

Want to know more?

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/egypt/

Source: The Daily Express & MJWN