The Whale Star Brendan Fraser On Why His Oscar-Nominated Role Was Worth The Wait: I Didnt Have The Life Experience

“Sorry I’m a few minutes late, I’m just trying to situate my lap dog,” apologizes Brendan Fraser from his upstate New York home. “Isn’t it funny in this age of Zoom, we can’t pretend we’re not at home anymore,” he laughs.

Being home must be really nice for the actor after spending countless days on the road attending events and international premieres to promote his critically acclaimed role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. In it, Fraser plays Charlie, a 600-pound writing professor trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter before it’s too late. It’s an awards tour that allows Fraser to not only graciously accept the accolades, but also reflect on the experience of shooting this movie during the worst of the pandemic.

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“I’m only too glad to comport myself to all of this, but this is more than just doing a tour,” Fraser says. “Me and my castmates gave everything we had because it was a film made in Covid and we didn’t know if there was going to be a tomorrow. In my view, years from now, we’re going to look back at the movies that were made [during the pandemic] and we’re going to see some kind of secret ingredient to all of them. Everyone lived under an existential threat, and a sincere concern for one another’s well-being and it’ll show in these performances.”

Before The Whale, Fraser spent much of his 1990s and early 2000s as a fixture in physical comedies like Encino Man and George of the Jungle before landing the part of much-loved hero Rick O’Connell in The Mummy series. Though he received critical acclaim in 1998 for Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters, Hollywood tended to pigeonhole Fraser into taking on lighter fare, underestimating his abilities. Regularly working the past decade, Fraser featured in ensemble TV series like The Affair and Doom Patrol, but nothing generated the same kind of fervor as his blockbuster past.

Then, director Darren Aronofsky surprised Fraser by reaching out to him about playing the role of Charlie, adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s play, The Whale. “The word on the street was Darren’s making a movie, and he wants to meet you,” recalls Fraser. “My answer… yes. I’m feeling a bit astonished that he even knows who I am, and I arrive at his office with no small measure of creative intimidation from my end.

“I was very delighted to see he’s a gentleman who starts conversations right in the middle,” Fraser says. “He gets right to the substance, which was telling me it’s about a man who is living alone who has been incredibly sad since the passing of his partner and regrets decisions that left him on the other side of custody for his child.

“It was very exciting because it was an opportunity to play a character who is in search of redemption. Then he tells me Charlie’s body weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds with a health condition where he will die of congestive heart failure very quickly.”

The dramatic combination would be a tremendous uphill battle for any actor to undertake, but Fraser was more than happy and he felt grateful to be considered for this opportunity. “Darren was very frank about finding an actor who could physically create the role from the outside, but also give a performance that had an emotional depth,” Fraser says. “He was basically showing me his chessboard of how he was going to approach it, and I immediately wanted to stand next to him and help him figure out how to make all the pieces work together.”

“Then March 2020 rolled around, and we all know what happened,” Fraser remembers. “We went home to put on our comfortable pants.”

Fraser assumed that the project was over. Then months later, plans began to make the film possible with extensive safety protocols. But there was a problem with getting him fitted for a suit virtually.

“Instead of going through a normal compounding process of creating a mold of my face, Adrien Morot [prosthetic makeup designer] could only work off a 3D scan virtually,” Fraser says. “That was done in my driveway by Jeremy [Dawson, producer], who showed up with an iPad, but my dog kept scurrying in at my ankles. The result, however, is seamless, down to the micro size of Charlie’s pores.”

“When we finally got together to make the film, I had my first makeup test with the suit, and Darren looked over my shoulder and said, ‘For the rest of your life.’ I knew then that if I wanted to be up for this test, I had to own it. So, from that point forward, I learned how to exist as Charlie in this five-point harness suit that had conforming weight and a unitard with pipes running cold water through it. I also worked with our movement coach Beth Lewis, and we worked on centers of gravity, inertia to stand, and the support conditions that people who live with obesity have to have. My job was to sell it because, until this point in films, we haven’t seen a costume and makeup done with this kind of dignity and respect.”

Looking back at Fraser’s most popular performances, his fearless physicality played a big part in the characters he played. That list now includes Charlie. “I’ve always sought to find a physical body objective in whatever I’m doing. If it’s an action movie, I’ve found that it’s best to play the next scene, not the one you’re in. In other words, if I’m in a film where the end goal is to get to the car, all the scenes I’m in beforehand lead to that final goal. So, for Charlie, I have to get to the end of the hallway to the bathroom, not to use it, but not to let my daughter see me cry.”     

Though the physical aspect of Charlie needed to be perfected for the screen, Fraser had to figure out how to give a respectful performance that would honor this character. “Charlie has a secret superpower,” Fraser says. “He is able to bring out the good in others even when they can’t see that in themselves or they feel that they’re irredeemable. He appreciates beauty in the humanities and is a composite of people I’ve known; teachers I’ve had from back in the day, drama tutors I’ve worked with, friends I’ve made and lost.”

Playing Charlie also allowed Fraser to collaborate with the Obesity Action Coalition to understand the daily battles obese individuals face. “Obesity is an affliction and a disease for people who deserve our empathy and our help and our respect. Because how they present to the world means that they can’t get adequate healthcare. They’re passed over and diminished in societal settings and ridiculed in media. You can really harm someone’s physical health by the way you speak to them. I know that many people who live with obesity said when they were children, something said to them set off a cycle in their lives. In fact, a woman wrote to Darren last week and said she was frightened to get a bariatric procedure and she’s now going to after seeing the film. It will save her life. That was the hope we went into it with, to change some hearts and minds in an unsolicited, uncynical, cathartic way.”

Fraser also acknowledges that he couldn’t have played the role of Charlie earlier in his career. “I didn’t have the life experience or the heartache. I hadn’t been a father long enough 10 years ago to appreciate what it means to have a young person in your life.”

But the memory of Charlie is still a part of Fraser. “When this film was over, I had an unexpected reaction to taking off Charlie’s body the last time; I was really emotionally moved. I felt a strange sense of survivor’s guilt because I could take him off at the end of the day, and I’ve met people who live like that until they didn’t live anymore,” Fraser reflects. “I’ve had to take a page of my own sermon and rethink if I’ve been culpable or demeaning and overlooked them. Even if I did accidentally, I don’t ever want to do that again going forward.”

When The Whale premiered at the Venice Film Festival, a video of an emotional Fraser getting a six-minute standing ovation went viral, immediately placing him at the forefront of the awards conversation. But as an actor with more than 30 years of experience under his belt, his response to all of this has been extremely humble. “I approached this film as if I will never be called upon to do it again,” Fraser says. “I made myself vulnerable to everyone, and I find it liberating because I have nothing to hide or prove. I have nothing but respect for everyone who sees it, even the people who disagree with the material artistically.”

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