Brendan Fraser stars as obese man in The Whale
The former matinee idol is having a career ‘Brenaissance’ with his role in The Whale and is tipped for Oscars glory.
It’s the day after the world premiere of The Whale at the Venice Film Festival, where Brendan Fraser teared-up as he received a six-minute standing ovation for his astounding performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese English teacher.
Critics are hailing Fraser – once a matinee idol in George of the Jungle and The Mummy – as a renaissance man.
“For some reason I think of paintings of myself on the ceiling,” Fraser muses, deploying the playful humour he brought to his famous roles.
As for what lies ahead: “I know not what will come, but come what will, I will go there laughing – and that’s our friend Herman Melville in 1851.”
The Whale is the most successful arthouse release in the US of the past year, with box office there reaching $US10m. While the return is relatively modest, due to the pandemic, it nevertheless has put The Whale ahead of other arthouse titles, including Cate Blanchett’s Tar, The Banshees of Inisherin and Triangle of Sadness.
And Variety has named Fraser, 54, its frontrunner in the race for best actor at the Academy Awards, followed by Austin Butler (for Elvis), Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin), Bill Nighy (Living) and Tom Hanks (A Man Called Otto). The Academy Award nominations will be announced on January 24.
Such is the widespread love for Fraser – the “Brenaissance” is huge on the internet, particularly with younger audiences – that the Oscar seems his for the taking.
When director Darren Aronofsky was looking to cast his leading man in The Whale, Fraser, known for his boyish, wide-eyed looks in his youth, wasn’t in the serious-minded director’s orbit.
He ultimately spotted Fraser in a trailer for a low-budget Brazilian film where the actor had a supporting role.
“The reason the film took 10 years to make is that I couldn’t figure out how to cast Charlie,” Aronofsky explains. “I’d thought about every single actor and met with movie stars, but no one got me that excited. Often there’s an actor that is perfect for a role, like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler or Natalie Portman in Black Swan. But in projects that are so about character, finding the right actor at the right moment in his or her career has to really make sense.”
The reception for The Whale at its Venice premiere confirmed Aronofsky’s decision to go with Fraser was right.
“I had no idea of the passion and the nostalgia that was out in the world for Brendan that we witnessed last night, and that we’ve been seeing in the press,” he says.
“Charlie has such inner light, a movie-star light that movie stars have, and Brendan had that movie-star flair. At one point in his career people had sort of forgotten about it, but it’s still there, clearly – so it made sense.”
Fraser’s comeback began when he appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, a gem of a gangster movie in which he played a heavy.
Fraser said then, as he does now, that he has always been in work and has had at least a project a year, mainly on television. Most prominent has been his ongoing role as Robotman in the DC series Doom Patrol, screening on Binge and Foxtel Now.
He became famous, of course, for his comic roles in The Mummy (1999) and George of the Jungle (1997), noting that he had nowhere to hide his microphone as he swung through the trees in a loincloth. The chiselled, handsome actor was chosen by People magazine as one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people, though he was also hankering for dramatic roles.
He starred opposite Ian McKellen as James Whale’s love interest in Gods and Monsters (1998), and attracted considerable awards attention. Fraser called it a “thoughtful and achingly beautiful drama” and was thrilled that the film became a hit.
“It marked a milestone in my life, because I worked with Ian McKellen, one of the great actors I admire immensely, and I learned a great deal from him,” he says.
In The Whale – based on the experiences of the film’s screenwriter, Samuel D. Hunter – Fraser’s character Charlie lives alone in a small apartment in Idaho. He weighs 272kg and is only able to move with the aid of a walker and the help of his friend and carer, Liz (Hong Chau).
Eight years earlier, he’d left his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and their eight-year-old daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) when he fell in love with one of his students, a man named Andy who became the love of his life. Andy has since died.
“Slowly but surely, Charlie is stuffing his regret into self-recrimination, which manifests itself physically in the being he inhabits,” says Fraser, who also brings to the character surprising levity and positivity.
In creating the role, he drew on McKellen’s advice: “‘You have to do this like it’s the first time and also like it’s the last thing you’ll ever do’. So everything I’ve got I put on the screen. There is nothing I held back. It is all there.”
Fraser was not shy in allowing emotion to play across his face. Already heavier than he was in his youth, the actor gained weight for the role and was aided by facial prosthetics which took four hours each day to apply during the 40-day shoot. He wore a body suit – created via a virtual scan, a new technology – which took five people to get on and off.
“There were people plugging in the cables in my costume to run the cold water through my suit,” Fraser recalls. “It was almost like a NASCAR pit crew that had to come in and do some repairs in between,” he chuckles, adding that it was by far his most difficult experience as an actor. “Running around in the desert when I was younger was a cakewalk compared to this.”
Fraser met with members of the Obesity Action Coalition on Zoom during the pandemic. “I spoke with eight to 10 people who had or were going to have bariatric procedures and they shared their story, their vulnerabilities and their frustrations,” he says.
“Clearly, what was most important to them was that this was not a comic representation of what we had seen before. And you can give all those assurances going into it, but I was positively chuffed to know that having seen the film they thought the character was treated with dignity and respect. This is a human being – this is really the point of the film.”
What enabled him to connect with Charlie on such a deep level?
“I understand that it’s harmful to call people mean names and I am no stranger to that,” he confides. “I have eyes and my feelings have been hurt in years past through vicious people who use social media in various ways.
“I just needed to remind myself that there’s a person on the other end and that words indeed are harmful.
“People from the OAC told me there was always an adult – a teacher or family member, often it was a father – who made them feel awful about their body weight. Painful indeed, it’s vindictive speech. I do feel that you should not write one another off based on your physical appearance, your gender orientation or your belief systems, and Charlie’s journey to redemption is no exception.”
Redemption comes when Charlie re-connects with his daughter Ellie, now 17.
“He has really disappointed her and made her incredibly sad and that manifests in her rage,” Fraser says. “Charlie has an ability to see the good in others – his students, his child – when they can’t see it in themselves. Sadly, he’s his own worst enemy.”
The journey that father and daughter embark on in the film requires Sink’s Ellie to yell at her father.
“She taunts him, she knows he can’t turn his head,” Fraser says. “I saw Sadie stare down a really scary monster, Vecna in Stranger Things, and I’ve seen that look in her eyes up close and she’s good at it. In The Whale she brought a prescience in her acting that I haven’t seen in all the time I’ve been doing this.”
Sink, 20, says Ellie’s rage stems from her inability to see her father throughout her childhood. “She wants control and that’s the only way she knows how,” she says. “Her coping mechanism is to lash out. It seems justified when you know her anger comes from how she has been conditioned to feel in control, when so much of her life has been out of her control.”
The Whale is based in part on the experience of its author, Samuel D. Hunter, who had been obese in his youth. He wrote The Whale initially for the stage – it played at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in New York in 2012 – and then adapted it as a screenplay for Aronofsky’s film.
“I wanted to write a play about an expository writing teacher, because at the time I was teaching expository writing and like the character I was struggling to connect with the students,” Hunter says.
“I found myself begging them to write something honest. So that led me to the story about Charlie trying to reconnect with his daughter. But the risky part came in taking elements of my own personal story, which are hard for me to talk about, even now. When I was in my early 20s, I was up to 140 pounds (63kg) bigger as I was self-medicating with food. I was a gay kid in a small Idaho town and attended a fundamentalist Christian school and I was outed and had to leave.
“I didn’t know if I wanted to really access that part of myself, but I’m glad I did.”
Fraser commends Hunter for transposing his experiences into the role of Charlie.
“Sam’s a very generous, vulnerable, open person with an uncanny ability for dramatic structure and precise dialogue and word language to support those things that he lived through and has contributed to telling this story,” he says.
“Those are all the guideposts of what makes a good drama. There’s friction. It was first a stage play so it was battle-tested off-Broadway and in regional theatres. He brings an intimacy to the film where you feel like you spend the last five days with Charlie and his family and his friends.”
Meanwhile, Fraser has two high-profile movies coming up. He appears alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s period crime thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon, and with Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage in the comedy Brothers.
What did it mean to work with Scorsese? “You’re in the presence of a master where everyone who is around him brings him the tools he needs. It was an eye-opener, an education, really a masterclass.”
We can imagine Fraser is only just getting started – again.
The Whale opens on February 2.
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