‘The Whale’ Star Brendan Fraser on Playing a Man Who Weighs 600 Pounds: ‘I Needed to Learn to Move In a New Way’
variety.comManori Ravindran International Editor Brendan Fraser, the star of the Venice-premiering movie “The Whale,” says he needed to “learn how to move in a new way” in order to play his character Charlie, who weighs 600 lbs.
Fraser takes on his most substantial role in a number of years with Darren Aronofsky’s latest, in which Charlie is slowly eating himself to death while struggling with congestive heart failure.
An English teacher who holds online courses (with the camera off), Charlie eats to escape the pain of losing the love of his life, his former night-school student Alan, with whom he began a relationship after leaving his wife and then eight-year-old daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink).
Over the course of a week, he tries to reconnect with Ellie. “I developed muscles I did not know I had,” Fraser told journalists at a press conference in Venice on Sunday, ahead of the movie’s world premiere. “I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed; it was like stepping off the dock onto a boat in Venice.
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