Charlie is a literature teacher. He teaches classes online. His students have never seen him because his computer’s camera is broken. Although that’s just an excuse. Charlie doesn’t want anyone to look at him, because he feels like a monster. He weighs 272 kilos. He knows that his physical appearance can only generate rejection.

Brendan Fraser has risen from his own film ashes to play Charlie in The Whale, Darren Aronofsky’s latest film that hits Spanish screens tomorrow and has already brought him the Critics’ Choice award for best actor and a nomination for Oscar. “The whale changed me physically and emotionally,” explains Fraser in a videoconference interview with various international media including La Vanguardia, in which he has been seen without any kind of qualms.

Because Fraser is once again the fashionable actor as he was at the end of the 90s when he became a sex symbol by starring in The Mummy movies (Stephen Sommers). Then came the bad times. Several injuries and a difficult divorce led to depression and B-movies. Aronofsky, who had been searching for an actor for 10 years to adapt The Whale, a play by Samuel D. Hunter, rediscovered Fraser in a third-rate Brazilian film and knew she had found her man.

“I met with Aronofsky and we talked about the project, but I knew little about the film, only that it was about a man who lives alone, who is sorry for something he did in the past and who has to reconnect with his daughter to redeem himself because He has little time left to live”, recalls the actor. Then the script came to him, he read it and he had the same surprise as Charlie’s students when they finally get to see him: that character weighs 272 kilos.

Fraser felt “empathy for Charlie from the get-go”, but also knew that playing him was going to be “quite a challenge, because playing him meant creating him aesthetically through makeup and then turning him into something real, someone who looks real, which forced me to to learn to walk in a different way, adapting to the laws of gravity and physics so that my movement was authentic”.

The actor accepted the challenge and went to work with the artistic director, who “made a cybermodel with the computer and then printed digitally created parts from which the prostheses emerged” that turned Fraser into a morbidly obese. “From then on, I would sit in a chair for hours on end and strain the patience of the rest of the actors, especially Sadie Sink, who plays my daughter, and Hong Chau, who plays my best. friend, because I was sweating a lot and they had to touch up my makeup. The most difficult part of the role were those breaks, because I was very aware that I had to forget all that technical part to reconnect with the character, with his sadness”.

And it is that Charlie lives tortured by an event from his past that led him to distance himself from his wife and his daughter and that later caused him a loss from which he never recovered. He was already a “big” man, but not fat when he chose to drown his grief in copious amounts of pizza, jars full of chicken batter from Kentucky Fried Chicken, huge sandwiches overflowing with mayonnaise, and every kind of junk food imaginable. .

This led him to the loneliness of his sofa, from which he can barely move, and to the certainty that he has very little time to live, “but before he dies he has to recover his relationship with his daughter and that was the great challenge For me in this role: that moment when I got the girl back was like being reborn after a curse.”

During filming, Fraser spent four hours getting into Charlie’s body, “I could have taken off my suit and been me again, but I couldn’t be the same anymore, because now I know how people who are morbidly obese live and also that they cannot heal without help. Also, I have discovered how a person who is ashamed of himself feels. The whale changed me physically and emotionally in a way that I did not think possible”, reiterates the actor, whose transformation has also been professional, since “it has allowed me to get out of my comfort zone by accepting a role that is far from what the public expected of me. my”.

A risky role that can bring him an Oscar despite how high the bar is, because Fraser rivals four other great actors: Austin Butler (Elvis), Colin Farrell (Inisherin’s Banshees), Bill Nighy (Living) and Paul Mescal ( Aftersun).