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Brendan discusses how his priorities for choosing new projects were affected

Brendan discusses how his priorities for choosing new projects were affected

Brendan discusses how his priorities for choosing new projects were affected

Brendan discusses how his priorities affected for choosing new projects

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  • The Whale, a movie adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play, stars Fraser.
  • In addition to writing the screenplay alone, Hunter also had a hand in the movie’s production, which is a rare chance for a screenwriter.
  • Fraser prepared for the movie in addition to rehearsals by spending a lot of time with the Obesity Action Coalition, an online support organization for people who are obese.
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The Whale, Brendan Fraser’s most recent picture, is unquestionably unlike anything we’ve seen from him before, despite the fact that he has continually added to his repertoire over the years. (Or, for that matter, anything we’ve seen from any actor.

The Whale, a movie adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play, stars Fraser. He portrays Charlie, an English teacher who is confined to his home due to his obesity. Charlie has a limited amount of time left and is eager to find salvation and his family, but doing so requires him to confront decades’ worth of difficulties, errors, and profound regrets.

I had the chance to speak with Fraser and Hunter about their experience adapting the play to the big screen before The Whale opens in theatres on December 9. In addition to writing the screenplay alone, Hunter also had a hand in the movie’s production, which is a rare chance for a screenwriter. He clarified:

“This is a pretty unique situation in terms of screenwriting given that this is a play that I wrote from a very personal place. And I followed this play around in the first four productions doing rewrites and working very closely with the cast. I think it’d be a different situation if Darren thought of an idea for a story and then hired somebody to execute it for him. And in the moment I arrived on set, I was really just like, ‘I’m just here to help. I don’t want to be in anybody’s way. I just want to be a resource for everybody,’ and I hope I was.”

Fraser affirmed that Hunter’s assistance was a priceless asset and emphasized the value of having the chance to practice the scenes before shooting:

“We had three weeks to rehearse this. That’s quite unheard of when making a feature film. So A24 was really generous with that amount of time. Day one Darren declared us a theater company and we took to the rehearsal space with a taped-out floor of the apartment, a one-to-one sizing, and we approached it as would [Sam’s] production when it was on stage. We learned how to play the part before we actually got to the built set because it will be such tight conditions and, you know, a film set’s quite cluttered and sometimes like a submarine crew, really. We’d be on top of each other, but we already knew what the story was.”

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Fraser prepared for the movie in addition to rehearsals by spending a lot of time with the Obesity Action Coalition, an online support organization for people who are obese. His portrayal was greatly influenced by the knowledge he acquired, even though the specifics may not have been communicated through conversation in the movie. He described:

“Those that I was in touch with gave me the most vulnerable and sincere stories, their testimonial about what their life [is] now, as it was when they were children, and what their hopes were. These [were] people who were possibly awaiting a bariatric procedure, who had one. At any rate, they were people who either had gone through a huge transition or they’re about to where they were stuck somewhere in between. And for what I learned from them was we’re all just people at the end of the day. We all are. And it’s difficult to connect with those that we love the most when we are confronted by [] society doing its very best to dismiss them. This is a story that lets us look inside Charlie’s apartment. It opens the door and invites us in to see who he is and the challenges he has. I felt that everything I learned by that consultation definitely informed who Charlie was.”

Despite the fact that The Whale is very different from Fraser’s previous movies and television shows, he said that any previous opportunities that required any kind of physical effort were helpful when taking on the role. He said it like this:

“Anything that I had to do where it required effort, physical effort. Action films and comedy sequences and stunts and all of that can be painted with a pretty broad brush, but it taught me to come from a place of just using the body. Charlie needed to do a deadlift like an Olympic athlete every time he stood up, and the gear that I was wearing, the apparatus, and the makeup, while it was cumbersome, it was necessary to sell the gravity that he would have to live with. I know that probably in the movies that I’ve made in that way, in terms of having a real objective to sell a character’s physicality and his body, all those types of roles all came into play when we did Charlie.”

I decided to ask Fraser how his transformation might affect the roles and projects he takes going forward since he has previously described the experience of making The Whale as an “intensely personal journey” that had him come “out the other side transformed.” He stated the following:

“The hope is that you’ll find material that’s meaningful to not only everyone creating it, but your audience too. That can be a big ask sometimes when looking for something interesting to do. I just know that I feel I have been changed in the sense that I really want to work on projects that, honestly, I just care more about. I love to make people laugh. I love to have something exciting or interesting or innovative happen when I work on a film, but if there’s something there that can speak to a broader common humanity that we all share, I want to be a part of something like that.”

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