Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career

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Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career
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“It’s tragic,” Brendan Fraser says of Batgirl’s cancellation. “It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio. Leslie Grace was fantastic. She’s a dynamo — just a spot-on performer.”

fought armies of the undead in “The Mummy.” He swung from vines in “George of the Jungle.” He traveled around the world with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in “Looney Toons: Back in Action.” He made a pact with Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil in “Bedazzled.” He partied with Pauly Shore as a reanimated Neanderthal in “Encino Man.” He even took a shower with Matt Damon in “School Ties.

“With Mickey, there was a lot of negative energy around him because of the middle finger that he gave to the industry,” Aronofsky says. “Brendan was beloved, but he just didn’t have that opportunity to show all these sides. It’s about getting the right role in the right moment as an actor.” “It felt so affirming,” Fraser says. “I was emotional because it was acknowledgment that what we did is making an impact. And that kind of response feels completely new in my professional life.”

“With those other companies, a theatrical release wasn’t a guarantee,” says Aronofsky. “But this film needs a theatrical platform. It benefits from a shared experience. It’s not as good when you watch it at home with the phone ringing or the dog barking or all the other distractions.” But most of the time, Fraser has been asked to lead big, splashy franchise projects that didn’t really require much emoting, and the excitement of being a movie star curdled as the years went by. Over the past decade, Fraser has largely avoided the limelight. There wasn’t any career-annihilating catastrophe on his résumé — there were bombs, to be sure, like “Monkeybone,” or jobs beneath his talent .

There was another, darker reason that Fraser left the stage. In the GQ profile, the actor said he was groped by Philip Berk, the former head of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. Berk denied the allegation, but admitted to pinching Fraser’s behind, saying it was a joke. “I’m in a place now where not only do I want to do the heavy lifting with my body, I also want to do it with my mind,” he says.

“I don’t want to call out colleagues by name,” says Fraser. “But a lot of those movies are one-note and depict obesity with crude jokes.”Benedict Evans for Variety “There was a chapter in the making of this film where we tried to research obese actors,” says Aronofsky. “Outside of not being able to find an actor who could pull off the emotions of the role, it just becomes a crazy chase. Like, if you can’t find a 600-pound actor, is a 300-pound actor or 400-pound actor enough?”

Hunter understands that kind of prejudice intimately. To write “The Whale,” he mined his own experiences growing up gay in the Midwest and the solace he sought in overeating. Fraser’s kindheartedness is certainly on display when he sits down for an interview. He speaks so quietly you strain to listen, expresses genuine mystification over the intense response “The Whale” received at screenings, and seems congenitally incapable of being an imposition. Even the way he asks the server for a drink seems like the antithesis of movie star entitlement: “Just some water. A small glass of water, if you could.

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