How Brendan Fraser’s Life Made Him “The Whale”?

In 2012, Samuel D. Hunter created the piece The whale where he introduced us Charlie, an English teacher who loses his family after coming out as gay. Stagnant in the most literal and metaphorical sense of the term, weighing nearly 300 kilos, Charlie locks himself up in his home without having contact with anyone.

The only people he hangs out with are Your students (gives online lessons with the camera off so they don’t see it), a nurse named Liz, his teenage daughter Ellie and his ex-wife Marywith whom he barely regains contact.

One day things change when a young man named Brother Thomas, a Mormon which seems to be the key to Charlie regaining meaning in his life. And so, The whale bECOMES an essay on love, the body, religion, education, sexuality, fatherhood and literature. A portrait of loneliness and human relationships…something that sometimes seems to be overlooked and is so lacking in Hollywood (respectively).

Aronofsky’s movie

For the movie, Fraser plays Charlieand it does so with a very interesting cast that includes Sadie Sink (Max from stranger things), Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton. All under the direction of Darren Aronofsky, who returns after the controversial mother! of 2017.

One of the most interesting elements of The whale is the presence of cinematographer Matthew Libatique, a well-known collaborator of Aronofsky on films such as Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Fountain, Black Swan, Noah there mother! (everything but the wrestler).

This film is Labatique’s second production in Venice, as he also comes for his work in don’t worry darling Olivia Wilde.

As we said, Brendan Fraser was one of the most popular actors of the 1990s. with several comedies like George of the Jungleand to close the millennium, he starred in one of his biggest commercial hits: The Mummywhich has become a huge trilogy.

In 2001, the sequel was released, and three years later, Fraser played Accident by Best Picture Oscar winner Paul Haggis where he shared a cast with Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe, and more.

Then, he got noticed with another large-scale film entitled Journey to the Center of the Earthand that same year, in 2008, also released the third installment of The Mummy. But it was the beginning of the end, because during the filming of the tape, Brendan Fraser was injured and had to undergo endless surgeries.

The spine was operated on with a laminectomy, but things did not go well and a year later he had to enter the operating room again. And from there, several interventions were unleashed, like a partial knee replacement surgery to repair the vocal cordsetc

During interview for GQ in 2018, the actor He said that for seven years he had been in and out of different operating rooms. This, of course, affected his ability to work, his finances and also his personal relationships.

Indeed, during the shooting of this film, Fraser announced their divorce from Afton Smith after nine years of marriage and three children together. The youngest of them, born in 2006, was diagnosed with autism spectrum syndrome.

The actor revealed that She was the victim of power and sexual abuse at the hands of Philip Berk, former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It wasn’t just the constant surgeries that kept him off the set, but also the trauma generated by Berk’s abuse after a 2003 encounter. HERE the new.

Added to this is the death of his mother in 2016 after a hard battle with cancer. Days after his death, Fraser revealed, he was forced to promote The casea series in which he does not have a main role (and besides, they sent him back to the world of interviews after years).

But now everything looks different for Brendan Fraser. In 2021, he appeared in No sudden movement by Steven Soderbergh, and it was soon announced that he was to appear in The Moonflower Slayers by Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio and would play The whale for Aronofsky. It was also announced that he would be part of the cast of bat girl.

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