Actor Brendan Fraser felt the ‘epidemic’ of loneliness while filming Rental Family in Tokyo

LOS ANGELES – In the moving comedy-drama Rental Family, Brendan Fraser plays Phillip, a Tokyo-based American expatriate whose career acting in Japanese commercials has stalled.

But he is then hired by a “rental family” agency – a real service where clients pay to have people act as their relatives, spouses or friends, either for social events or companionship.

And as Phillip immerses himself in his clients’ lives, he starts to develop genuine connections – and discovers a new sense of purpose.

Speaking at the movie’s screening in Los Angeles in late 2025, Fraser, 57, says he loved the experience of shooting on location in Tokyo for several months, but was struck by how lonely many people there seem.

“In Tokyo, there’s so much energy and activity – and astonishingly, there’s so much loneliness at the same time.

“It seems like there’s an epidemic of it,” says the American-Canadian performer, who took home a Best Actor Oscar for playing a morbidly obese man trying to reconnect with his daughter in The Whale (2022).

His character Phillip has to navigate that isolation as well.

“For whatever reason, he’s not been in the United States for seven or so years, and he’s either on a journey to find himself – or waiting for whatever’s around the corner to reveal who he is as a human in one of the most populous cities in the world,” Fraser says.

The story resonated with the actor because “it spoke to a sense of longing and a need for connection”.

“And it struck me that even if you have a substitute relationship, it still can do some good.”

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Jan 22, Rental Family was written and directed by 48-year-old Japanese film-maker Mitsuyo Miyazaki, known professionally as Hikari.

The idea for the story came when her co-writer Stephen Blahut was living in Japan in 2018 and looking for jobs that he, as an American, could do – and being a “rental family” actor was one of them.

“So, we started looking into why this exists and why people use these services, and even though I’m Japanese, and was born and raised there, I had no idea why.

“And it was actually much more touching and deeper than I ever expected,” says Hikari, who wrote and directed the acclaimed Japanese drama film 37 Seconds (2019).

The sense of isolation felt by many Japanese grew even more during the Covid-19 pandemic, she adds. “And the number of people who use these services was far more than I ever imagined,” says the film-maker, who also directed three episodes of the Emmy-winning Hollywood drama series Beef (2023).

Mari Yamamoto, the Japanese actress who plays an employee of the rental family agency, visited a real agency to learn more about this phenomenon.

And the client stories the agency shared – for instance, about an elderly woman who had hired it ostensibly to change her air-conditioning filter, but really just wanted someone to talk to – showed how important such services are.

“That really brought home the point to us that this is a necessity in Japanese society,” says the 39-year-old, who starred in the Korean-Japanese historical drama Pachinko (2022 to 2024).

“In Japan, the love language between family members – how we convey love or show that we care – is that we don’t want to burden the other person.

“The worst thing you can do is to burden somebody with your problems, with your feelings, with something that will trouble them too.

“So, often, we keep it from our loved ones,” says Yamamoto.

“It’s a complex thing, and I think that is what’s behind the rental family service – people don’t want to trouble their loved ones or friends with their problems, so it’s sometimes easier to pay somebody to be there for them.”