Brendan Fraser has a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: a new movie, Rental Family, that’s warming audiences and critics in theaters this holiday season, as well as the major boost of winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Whale and all the new opportunities it has brought him. He joins me in conversation for this week’s edition of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side to talk about, well, everything.
We start with the rather startling fact that he has been making movies for more than 35 years, and many of them are still finding new audiences, even from early ’90s cult classics Encino Man and George of the Jungle to acclaimed dramas such as Gods and Monsters and School Ties. Of course, there is much talk about how The Whale changed everything, and he reveals that the rather obscure little movie he made in Brazil called Journey to the End of the Night was the unexpected key to his getting the role director Darren Aronofsky had been trying to cast correctly for over a decade before giving the green light to making the movie. It just reinforced his belief that in no matter what you are doing you have to remember to “get it right.”
He certainly seems to have done that as well in Rental Family, about an ex-pat struggling actor in Japan who takes a job in an agency that hires actors to become part of real-life families and people who need some sort of human connection. It is a very real thing in Japan, and there are more than 300 companies specializing in it. The film won the Audience Award in numerous film festivals this fall from Hawaii to Chicago to Middleberg and many more. It is the first leading role Fraser took on following his Oscar win, of which he told me, “It humbled me to accept, and I felt I better earn this.”hamm
We also talk about upcoming projects including trade reports that he is lining up another Mummy movie, with Rachel Weisz returning as well. He sets the record straight on that with fingers crossed that it might happen, but at this point it is just speculation. On a firmer front, he has completed Pressure, a film set in WWII, in which he plays Gen. Dwight Eisenhower planning the 1944 D-Day Invasion and all that went into it. He also just completed a role in Joe Diamond, starring and directed by Andy Garcia, which he says is a nice throwback to ’90s-style filmmaking.
To watch our conversation and to get the “actor’s side” of things from Brendan Fraser, just click the link above.
Join me every Wednesday this Oscar season for a new edition of The Actor’s Side, and every Monday for a new episode of Behind The Lens.