Darren Aronofsky on The Whale, casting Brendan Fraser and fat suit criticism

Click the play button above to listen to Darren Aronofsky's full conversation with Tom Power.

When Darren Aronofsky cast Brendan Fraser as the lead in his latest film, The Whale, it wasn't with the intention of resurrecting the actor's career, though Fraser's star turn has made him the early favourite to win best actor at the 2023 Oscars.

"The thing about Brendan is he has that internal fire that made him this megastar 20 years ago — and it's still there," the director told Q's Tom Power in an interview. "Brendan's always had that. But to be clear, he just really clicked for it. There was no real calculation like, 'Oh, Brendan was great once and people would like to see him come back.'"

WATCH | Darren Aronofsky's full interview with Tom Power:

Based on Samuel D. Hunter's play of the same name, The Whale is a psychological drama that follows Charlie (played by Fraser), a 600-pound reclusive writing instructor who's making a last-ditch effort to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.

It took Aronofsky 10 years to cast the film's lead due to the difficulty of the role. "[Charlie is] a very multifaceted, complicated character," said the director. "He's both incredibly giving and incredibly selfish. He's incredibly loving, but physically extremely hard to look at. So trying to find that actor who could kind of really bring this internal golden beauty to this character was just very hard."

Having considered "pretty much every movie star" for the part, Aronofsky finally spotted Fraser in the trailer of a low-budget Brazilian film. "A light bulb went off, and I was like, 'Oh, that guy can do it,'" he said.

In the '90s and early '00s, Fraser skyrocketed to the top of Hollywood's A-list thanks to films like Encino Man, George of the Jungle and The Mummy franchise. But sometime after 2008, he disappeared from the spotlight (the actor speculated on the reasons why this happened in a 2018 interview with GQ, in which he alleged he was sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association).

WATCH | Official trailer for The Whale:

When Aronofsky met with Fraser at his office in New York, the director said he could see "deep inside, he really wanted to work."

"I do like hungry actors," Aronofsky told Power. "I like actors that want to work. Generally, the characters that I am attracted to in scripts are not just black-spirited characters or white-spirited characters, they're complicated characters with very complicated morality … and you want to find the actors that want to go there."

After asking Fraser to read for the part of Charlie, Aronofsky knew he had finally found his leading man. "He was just spectacular," said the director. "It was just chills."

Backlash to Fraser's prosthetics

While Fraser's performance in The Whale has been widely lauded (it even earned him a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice International Film Festival), the film has also been the subject of criticism over the prosthetic fat suit the actor wears.

Responding to the backlash, Aronofsky acknowledged the "sad history" of how people living with obesity have been depicted in film. But in contrast, he said his film provides the viewer with an empathetic lens.

"It's often done in incredibly poor ways, usually for jokes or for derision," he said. "The characters themselves are purely to be laughed at or the butts of jokes. This is the exact opposite. This is about creating a character that the majority of people on the planet have a lot of prejudices towards, and within five minutes of the movie, we're inviting you to be like, 'Wow, there is a human in that skin.'"

Aronofsky said the other thing that separates The Whale is the technology used to realistically transform Fraser's body for the screen. 

"We didn't use cut foam and stuff," he said. "We tried to make a body that moved like a human body with techniques that have never been done."

The director recalled an early conversation he had with makeup artist Adrien Morot about the prosthetics. "It was basically like, 'Is this possible? Can we make a fully emoting, realistic human, so that we can sort of smash apart all of those clichés and terrible, terrible examples of the past, and sort of welcome an audience into the humanity of Charlie, this character?'"

The Whale is out now in theatres in Toronto. The film will get a wider release across Canada on Dec. 21.

Written by Vivian Rashotte. Interview produced by Kaitlyn Swan.