Brendan Fraser: "It's not that easy to get rid of me"

Millions of viewers know his face.

She has seen him escape from a mummy or fly through the jungle hanging from a vine.

They have laughed with him, over and over again.

But rarely have they seen what Brendan Fraser was truly capable of.

Not even the director Darren Aronofsky was so aware of his talent.

He also did not control all of his filmography.

But he assures that something, in the entrails, told him that there was the actor he had been looking for 10 years.

He had spent a decade envisioning "every Hollywood star," in the filmmaker's words, for the lead role in

, that of Charlie, an obese professor, locked up in his house, his body and his remorse.

Until he crossed paths with Fraser and knew the search was over.

The result, which has premiered these days at the Venice Festival, has amazed and excited the public.

So much so that some already take for granted the actor's first Oscar nomination.

More information

Penélope Cruz even plays Raffaella Carrà

“I never went that far.

It is not so easy to get rid of me”, laughs Fraser himself, in a meeting this Monday with journalists at the Mostra.

He wears a hat and speaks slowly, sounding almost like a whisper.

And the superpower, as he himself confesses, “of telling jokes to divert attention”.

In talk, however, he barely uses it.

Because there is much, and deep, to talk about.

So much so that the actor corrects the bias of a question about how the prosthetics transformed his physique on the set.

And he recounts with extreme seriousness the creation of the material with a 3D printer, the almost six hours a day it took him to become Charlie and how he had to learn to move in a different way.

"I am very proud and happy to have worked on a film with so many talented people and that offers a message of tolerance," he adds.

Brendan Fraser, in a scene from 'The Whale'.AP

The Whale

is limited to one apartment and five characters: Charlie and the visitors he receives.

The man faces the epilogue of his self-destruction.

But first, he wants to do "at least one thing right in life," according to Fraser: namely, reclaim his relationship with his daughter Ellie.

So much intimacy is due to the original play that Aronofksy adapts, by Samuel D. Hunter.

And also to the choice of the filmmaker: “In the midst of covid, it did not seem responsible to me to film a great production.

Such an intimate piece was more appropriate.”

Just a few weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic, the creator decided that Fraser was the star he had always been looking for.

And so they ended up shooting at the worst moment of the health crisis, when there was little information and no vaccine.

"I remember thinking, 'This may be the first and last time we do this.'

I believe that,

Maybe the real actor was always there.

But his face had disappeared as the protagonist of great productions.

Since his last

,

and

, all from 2008, his star had declined, and Fraser changed course towards television, the more independent or secondary cinema in, for example,

(2021), by Steven Soderbergh.

For years, he has been considered exclusively a pretty boy, an angelic face with a certain talent for the breech - his best weapon of him in the

movies -, and little else.

That face, and the muscles that went with it, was perfect for products like, say,

or

.

Darren Aronofsky (left) and Brendan Fraser, yesterday in Venice.ETTORE FERRARI (EFE)

“Diversity has always been the pillar of my career.

I have tried and hope not to repeat myself.

And, at the same time, maintain who I am, ”defends Fraser.

Certainly, this Hollywood lightweight had proven that she could act on the few occasions he agreed to a meaty script.

As in

, Paul Haggis's

, or, better yet, his Clayton Boone in

, about the last days of James Whale, the director of

The drama depicts the filmmaker's relationship with a young gardener, Fraser's character, who serves as confessor and plaything for one last seduction.

There, perhaps, the Oscar nomination for supporting actor escaped him.

Although this time he can get the main one.

“I am the first surprised.

I prick myself to know it's true,” he adds.

Because next year, for example, he will be seen in

Martin Scorsese's

The son of Canadians, Brendan James Fraser was born in Indianapolis 53 years ago.

His father, a journalist, worked for the foreign service of the Canadian National Tourist Office.

That is why the Frasers moved numerous times during the childhood of Brendan, the youngest of four children.

His rise in the cinema was vertiginous: a year after his debut, he was already in 1992 with two completely opposite titles that served as a wonderful letter of introduction: the comedy

, in which he plays a caveman who is thawed by two high school students, and

, in which he plays a talented football player who must mask that he is Jewish in order to get into an elite school.

And so came fame, his marriage to actress Afton Smith, popular blockbusters, good jobs... and 2007, the year of the mess.

In that season, Fraser started appearing in bad movies (maybe he didn't get good scripts, or he made unfortunate choices) and faced a painful divorce.

In 2013 she even went back to court when she requested a reduction in the alimony that was passed to her ex-wife for her children: her salary was not enough.

In 2018, he recounted how Philip Berk, then president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, had molested him at a luncheon 15 years earlier.

That confession, together with the multiple operations he has undergone to recover from the injuries sustained during years of very physical sequences in action movies and the death of his mother, led him to depression.

Now, at last

has given him his big break.

And he has returned.

If he was gone.