The last time I met Brendan Fraser, he was bouncing off the walls of a Los Angeles hotel suite and looking every bit as popeyed, elastic-limbed and cartoonish as his animated co-stars in Looney Tunes: Back in Action. This was 2008. He was promoting the third Mummy film, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and not merely answering questions but turning the replies into zany skits or wackadoodle monologues. A jangling desperation, though, lurked just below the surface. It was never more apparent than when he recounted what he had said to a businessman who buttonholed him about the prospect of another Mummy sequel: “I don’t know! Leave me alone!”
Now we know why. Injuries sustained on that third Mummy picture led to seven years of hospital visits; there were operations on his back, a partial knee replacement and surgery on his vocal cords. In 2009, he and the mother of his three sons divorced. Then, in a 2018 interview headlined “Whatever happened to Brendan Fraser?”, he alleged that he had been groped in 2003 by Philip Berk, a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is responsible for the Golden Globes. (Berk apologised but denies any wrongdoing.)
Small wonder, then, that the figure who sits before me today in a London hotel room is unrecognisable as the human tornado I met back then. The square-shouldered 54-year-old, dressed in a dark suit, is sitting on a sofa looking as stiff as a bookend. He has a wary, spooked look in his eyes, as though bracing himself for calamity. Once the pin-up star of George of the Jungle and California Man, Fraser has put those goofball antics behind him after his period of trauma. A new phase of his career flickered into life last year with a minor role in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, and will continue next spring when he appears alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
First though, there is his performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale as Charlie, an expository writing teacher whose morbid obesity has left him confined to his Idaho flat. (The title refers to a passage from Moby Dick that surfaces repeatedly in the film in the form of an essay written by a student.) There is a certain synchronicity between actor and character: both have suffered from depression, as well as other people’s scepticism and preconceptions. For Fraser, the part looks like a comeback. Does it feel that way to him? He leans in conspiratorially, placing the back of his hand to his mouth as though preparing to share a great confidence. “I was never that far away,” he whispers.
He has trotted the line out before, but it still prompts affectionate laughter from the two colleagues who are here with him. In a sense, they all have something to prove. The 53-year-old Aronofsky, seated in an armchair to Fraser’s right, is coming off a divisive flop, the surreal, nightmarish Mother!, which starred his former girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence. Perched at the other end of Fraser’s sofa is the playwright Samuel D Hunter, whose theatre work, including The Whale, earned him a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius grant”) in 2014 but who is only now, at 41, making his debut as a screenwriter.
There’s never any guarantee that what works on stage will transfer to the big screen but The Whale went down a storm at the Venice film festival; footage of Fraser weeping appreciatively during a lengthy standing ovation has found its way online. He is also the current favourite to win next year’s best actor Oscar. (Aronofsky has form in rehabilitating fallen stars: he guided Mickey Rourke to a devastating performance, and an Oscar nomination, in The Wrestler.) How times change. After my 2008 meeting with Fraser, I noted that he had starred in several Oscar-approved films (Crash, Gods and Monsters, The Quiet American) but “has never had so much as a wink from the Academy. He probably never will. He’s not that sort of actor.” Call me Nostradamus.
Festivals and awards are one thing; the public is quite another. A movie about a dying man stuck in a flat would not be an easy sell at the best of times, let alone during a period in which cinema-going habits are yet to bounce back from Covid. The Whale isn’t a one-man show by any means: Charlie is visited by his ex-wife (Samantha Morton); their teenage daughter (Sadie Sink), who is still raging at her father for leaving the family in favour of his boyfriend; a sparky nurse (Hong Chau), and a young religious evangelist (Ty Simpkins) hoping to save Charlie’s soul. It may take a while, though, to warm to Charlie himself, who is first seen masturbating so furiously to online pornography that he almost gives himself a heart attack.
Fraser wears a sweaty 300lb body-suit, with some minor CGI augmentation. Is the film daring us to care about this woebegone fellow who at first seems so repellent? Hunter looks aghast at the idea. “No!” he exclaims. “I wasn’t concerned with whether an audience member would identify with him. I bristle at the idea of likability because that’s inherently …” He recalibrates. “These are human beings. I don’t think you should have to see yourself reflected in another human being to have empathy.”
That introductory scene, though, is hardly a warm and welcoming hug. “I guess,” he concedes. “But human beings are human beings.” Aronofsky and Fraser keep stumm while Hunter presses on: “When I wrote the play, I was teaching expository writing myself, and was having a hard time connecting to my students. I wanted to write about a teacher, and eventually I started putting personal stuff on the line. I’m a gay man from Idaho who grew up in the town where Charlie lives, and for a long time I was self-medicating with food, so it’s not hard for me to understand him. As a writer, I didn’t want to make any apologies.”
It was never an option to open out the action of the film, which is confined (as the play is) to a dingy flat over the course of a single week. “The room was part of what attracted me to it, and what made Charlie this unique character,” says Aronofsky. “He’s a shut-in.” Fraser is nodding along. “He has ambulatory limitations,” the actor says. “Even getting out of his chair requires herculean effort.” The director gives a scoffing laugh: “Yeah, what are we gonna do? Take him to the mall?”
Even taking a few steps to the front door to collect a pizza delivery becomes as monumental as a moon walk. “During those moments, I told Brendan, ‘Take a breath,’” the director recalls. As he says this, he reaches over and pats Fraser’s hand reassuringly. “Brendan took this kind of half-breath, and I thought: ‘Yeah, that’s probably all Charlie could manage.’” The physical demands on the actor were immense. “It took four hours to get into my makeup in the morning,” he recalls, “and an hour-plus change at the end of the day. All that hyperventilating, simulating a cardiac event, gets you feeling dizzy, too.”
Why cast Fraser? “It was clear there was this inner light in him and it hadn’t been harnessed in a long time,” says Aronofsky. “When I met him, he was a gentleman. It was also clear he wanted to work. I knew it was going to be very difficult emotionally and technically, and I needed an actor who was 100% game to do that. Brendan was.”
Though slapstick comedies and special-effects extravaganzas made Fraser a star, he had already proven his range. One of his earliest roles was as a Jewish student targeted by antisemitic bullies (including a young Matt Damon) in School Ties. He acted opposite Viggo Mortensen in Philip Ridley’s heady gothic fable The Passion of Darkly Noon, and played Brick on stage in the West End in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2001. Was there a conflict between the sort of work that made him famous, and the range he knew he possessed? “All I ever wanted to be was a working actor,” he says. “As a teenager, I idolised the third and fourth-billed names; they’re the backbone of a project. I wanted to be among them. I’ve always felt drawn to a sense of diversity in my choices.”
In this age of debate over authentic casting, there have been objections to Fraser playing Charlie when he is, in fact, neither gay nor obese in real life. Did Hunter anticipate this reaction? “All that matters is knowing that the actor can bring tenderness and generosity amid Charlie’s pain and suffering,” the playwright says. “That bright light in the darkness.” Does this mean Hunter has no opinion on like-for-like casting? “I have nothing to say about the discourse.” Would it be fair to say he is neutral on the subject? He looks exasperated. “I don’t know. I guess. What’s important is that I felt that authenticity from Brendan.” Fraser pipes up from the other end of the sofa: “I was just there to give the most honest performance I could,” he says, his voice no louder than a squeak.
For Aronofsky, The Whale couldn’t feel timelier. “I think we’ve all been in Charlie’s position in the last few years,” he says. “We’ve lost so much human connection, and this film is about people who are isolated but trying to connect.” He optioned the play a decade ago, and might not have got around to filming it were it not for the pandemic. “After Mother!, there were many opportunities but the world had shifted. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to make a big movie. I thought it was dangerous. People were still dying. Five actors in a room was a landscape that seemed controllable.”
That also resonates with his earlier work. From the obsessive mathematician in his 1998 debut, Pi, to the boxed-in addicts of Requiem for a Dream and the febrile ballet company of Black Swan, Aronofsky thrives on claustrophobia and confinement. “There are a lot of similarities between Max in Pi and Charlie in The Whale,” he agrees. “They’re both stuck in a room. You could say I started in a room and now I’m ending in one.” Well, hopefully not ending, I say. “In the same place, then,” he laughs.
Albeit a brighter one. Whereas Pi was a brilliant but punishing watch, The Whale nails its life-affirming colours to the mast. “People can’t help caring,” says Charlie in one scene. “People are amazing.” The three men, whose film shows hope enduring in the bleakest of circumstances, seem united on this. “The harder and most complicated choice is having faith in people and the world despite the pain and suffering that can be inflicted on you,” says Hunter.
Fraser concurs. “I just came from a fan convention in New York,” he says. “Every 10th person told me: ‘You were part of my childhood.’ Even: ‘You were my childhood.’” How did that feel? “It’s heartwarming. We all stared at each other and had this moment. It was like: ‘Look at us. We’re here. And we’re all grown up now.’” Spoken like a true survivor.
• The Whale is released in the UK on 3 February
