A heavy bodysuit for a heavy soul in Brendan Fraser’s comeback film The Whale

SINGAPORE – In the drama

The Whale,

the main character Charlie is a man weighing 270kg.

Director Darren Aronofsky made the decision to show the protagonist’s body in full and, at times, unclothed.

To play Charlie, American-Canadian actor Brendan Fraser, 54, wore a bodysuit.

He says that for it to ripple and move like real flesh, it was constructed of heavy materials.

Inhabiting Charlie’s body, and feeling the effort it took to stand, walk or breathe under its weight, made it easier for him to inhabit the character’s mind.

“In the past, films trivialised bodysuits. They put an athletic actor inside a costume filled with the same batting material used in stuffed animals and cheap pillows,” Fraser says of shows that used “fat suits” for comic effect.

He was speaking to journalists at an online conference held in early December.

Taking off the heavy prosthetics at the end of the working day gave Fraser a sense of vertigo, like “stepping off a boat onto a dock and feeling like you’re still in motion”.

The relief he felt at shedding his character’s burden made him sympathetic towards those who had to bear it constantly, he says.

“I felt a moral obligation to portray this man with as much dignity and respect, given how cruel and cynical the world is towards people who live with obesity. We dismiss them so easily and readily,” he says.

In The Whale, which opens in cinemas on Thursday, Charlie is an English teacher who tutors online, but never switches on his camera.

He nurses a pain that shows itself in compulsive eating.

His friend Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse, fears he may eat himself to death, but neither of them has money for life-saving treatment.

Ellie (Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter from a previous marriage, shows up, opening a new wound on an already troubled soul.

Fraser recently earned a Best Actor Golden Globe nomination for playing Charlie and there is even Oscar talk, which many have judged as yet another sign of a comeback for the former leading man.

Starting in the early 1990s, he starred in a string of action-comedy hits including Encino Man (1992), George Of The Jungle (1997), The Mummy (1999) and Bedazzled (2000).

By 2010, however, he was no longer a feature film headliner, a fact he attributed to depression caused by, among other events, an act of sexual harassment by a highly placed journalist who might also have tried to sabotage Fraser’s career.

In subsequent interviews, however, Fraser has softened his view that he was the target of a blacklisting campaign.

Speaking at the conference attended by The Straits Times, he addressed earlier press reports in which he alleged sabotage by saying that every actor’s career goes through phases. Today, he has transitioned to another path.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have had a 30-plus-year career. For actors, careers go up, they go down. That’s normal. For whatever you’ve read, I have nothing to contradict that.

“I’ve always been busy. We love the job and as long as we still have an appointment to keep to start rehearsing or preparing or going to work, or we’ve got that call sheet that says be here at four o’clock in the morning, we’ll do it,” he says.

In recent years, Fraser has become a character actor, appearing in the fantasy series Doom Patrol (2019 to present) and crime drama No Sudden Move (2021).

The Whale is based on a stage play that Aronofsky saw in 2012, which he wanted to turn into a film almost immediately after.

Speaking at a separate online conference, the 53-year-old director says one reason for the film’s long gestation was the search for the right actor to play Charlie.

He says: “Brendan really hasn’t been around in a long time, but he is clearly beloved by the public. And I believe once a movie star, always a movie star. There’s something inside them that can relate to people all over the planet.

“When Brendan showed up, I saw someone who had not been given a chance to show what he can do. That’s always exciting to me as a film-maker. I know they’re gonna work really, really hard and really go for it and want to expose themselves.”

The Whale opens in cinemas on Thursday.