Brendan Fraser: “Every day it was hard to get into someone else’s body and remove their skin”

There are movies that instantly shock, impress with a single glance. And that’s what happensWhale. from the first moment we saw Brendan Fraser turned into a man weighing more than 300 pounds shock is inevitable. But herein lies the crux of the matter, because, among many other things, it is precisely what he is talking about, Darren Aronofsky’s latest work is about how society is conditioned by physical image.. Why does it bother us to see a man who does not fit the traditional parameters? Are we in a position to look beyond its weight?

The director never makes the viewer’s job easier. His films are connected with pain and the body, suffering from the physical, and although he always defends the humanity of his characters as they embark on a path to salvation, their journeys turn into real ordeals, which for some amount to almost sadism. No wonder Samuel D. Hunter fell in love with his game. After seeing it on Broadway. It was ten years ago and since then he has been trying to bring the project up for a movie adaptation.

“The Whale” tells the story of Charlie, a literature teacher who teaches online classes by turning off the on-screen camera so his students can’t see what he looks like. A few years ago, he lost his partner by suicide, who loved him but was deeply tormented by his homosexuality after spending his entire life in a sect to which his family belonged.

Since then, Charlie fell into a deep depression and began to eat. He knows that the organism can’t resist any longer, but before he dies, he tells his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) he hasn’t seen in ten years since he left his mother (Samantha Morton). Only Liz accompanies him in his difficult daily life (an amazing Hong Chau), sister of his deceased son.

Aronofsky composes with few characters and the reduced space of a house. It’s a film filled with layers that talk about faith, religious fundamentalism, loneliness, homophobia, depression and refuge in addiction (in this case food) and existential defeat. “The movie covers a lot of topics, yes, and I know many think my authorial voice is present in this movie, but what caught my interest was showing complex characters full of contradictions, virtues and faults, because that’s who we are. real life,” says the director. “One of the things I don’t like about Hollywood today is that the characters are one-dimensional, good or bad, and that makes movies shallow or not deep at all,” he adds.

And somehow both Darren Aronofsky and Brendan Fraser became industry snipers. The work of the former, although having some success, such as ‘Black Swan’, was too skewed for the traditional public and the latter had to bear the brunt of being removed from Hollywood after revealing that she was a victim of abuse. It caused Philip Berk, the former president of the Foreign Press Association (which awarded the Golden Globe), to a deep depression.

“It’s all too easy to put on labels that serve to condemn and stigmatize people in some way. That’s why I empathized with Charlie from the very first moment. I knew it was difficult to play him, but it also gave me the opportunity, in a way, to get on my own path to salvation through acting,” says the actor. “I’m happy to say I’ve never left, but I’m happy to be back.”

Indeed, the person who is the protagonist of adventure movies such as George of the Jungle‘ or the epic ‘Mummy’ and accepted sex symbol of the nineties, had to reinvent himself, and this gave him the opportunity to show off his acting skills that few have possessed and born out of his own suffering, making the film a more immersive experience because of the inevitable identification between actor and character. “There are seven basic emotions in cinema: joy, sadness, fear, contempt, anger, rage, and surprise, and the play had the ability to bring them all together. The amazing thing is that Brendan Fraser can visualize them with just his eyes, and only great actors can do that,” says Darren Aronofsky.

In addition to saying everything with his eyes, the actor had to put on makeup for hours to completely change his appearance. “It was a complicated job, every day I had to get into someone else’s body and remove their skin. They would put weight straps on my waist and ankles to give a sense of slowing down,” Fraser continues. “The key to the movie for me is when Charlie tries to get a key and he doesn’t. And you can feel it, the effort. It’s nice to shoot car chase scenes, it’s fun, but I don’t. I’m more interested in that little act that costs the world,” adds Aronofsky.

Finally, it should be noted that ‘The Whale’ is so named, not because of the hero’s weight, but because of his love for ‘Moby Dick’.Herman Melville’s novel that becomes the central motif of a narrative in which the spoken and unspoken words gain a fundamental meaning. “This is another of the prejudices people have about the movie. This is not a humiliating jokeIt is a literary reference that has an exciting and very poetic symbolic component and has to do with love and beauty”.

Source: Informacion

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