At the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia Sunday, Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his work in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” revealed the real reason why the director chose him for the role.
Fraser said Aronofsky was looking for “an actor who hadn’t been seen in a while” to play Charlie, the reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher, “and that was me.”
The actor also announced that he just wrapped shooting Anthony Maras’ “Pressure,” a ticking-clock thriller based on the true story of the 72 hours leading up to D-Day. Fraser plays Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in the film. “Hence the short hair. It is all growing back, thank you very much.”
Andrew Scott plays a meteorologist in the film, which focuses on the crucial role that weather forecasting played in the decisions leading up to D-Day. “All these conversations that weekend before, from the Thursday onward, were not inconsequential, and definitely made me appreciate a rather, you know, otherwise nerdy, inconsequential thing, like looking at your phone and wondering ‘What’s the weather going to be like.'”
He praised Maras for being a “fantastic collaborator,” as was Aronofsky. “The best directors are the ones who I think are collaborators and who create an ensemble and who have a real sense of community and the good ideas coming from that,” he said. He added that Maras “creates the reality of a scene to give an audience a feeling as if they’re a fly on the wall, and we’re seeing this happen in real time. Did I mention the movie was called ‘Pressure’ because that’s exactly what it was.”
He also spoke about another upcoming role, in Searchlight Pictures’ comedic drama “Rental Family,” which shot recently in Japan. The film is directed by Hikari, “a Japanese American who has written a story about what it means to have a family, it not being the one necessarily that we’re born into, but the one whom we encounter and collect in our lives.”
The film follows a down and out actor living in Tokyo, who is hired as the token American guy for a Japanese rental family company providing professional stand-in services.
He took the role, he said, “because it was so far removed from anything I’d seen, anywhere I’ve been asked to go and work. My experience in Tokyo was life changing. I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful place – you can’t get a bad meal in that town.”
He appreciated “the experience of being able to work with the Japanese crew and do my best to chop my way through the tall grass and learning some Japanese myself, which I’ve already forgotten, so don’t ask me.”
Fraser also paid tribute to the emotional support provided by his horse Pecas – which means “freckles” in Spanish – during the years when his career looked to be finished. Speaking about how he spent those fallow years, he said: “I had a horse for a while there. He’s not with us anymore, I’m sad to say. He’s in horsey heaven. He saved… not my life, but he certainly saved an emotional part of me.”
Fraser explained that Pecas had been one of the horses that featured in 2015 miniseries “Texas Rising” and after the shoot ended Fraser adopted him. “I put him on FedEx. I flew him through El Paso. I dropped him off at JFK. He came. He walked right into the barn close to my home, where I’d rented a stall for him, and he happily laid down on fresh cedar shavings and thought, yep, okay, I’m done.”
English (US) ·