The Best Actor Oscar race still doesn’t have a clear favorite, as the awards streak leading up to the big film festival has been split between three of the nominated actors: Colin FarrelFor Banshees of Inisherin, he won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Actor; Austin Butler, For Elvis, he won a BAFTA and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama; And Brendan Fraser, For The whale (The whale), was honored with the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild SAG Awards.
There fight between performers is served and, to make the decision of the academics more difficult, some images of the characterization process that Fraser had to undergo filming each day to become Charlie, a morbidly obese gay English teacher who lives in isolation at home and tries to reconnect with his daughter.
Prosthesis and a lot of extra pounds
We met Brendan Fraser in the late 90s, when he was 29 – he is now 54 – in the adventure comedy George of the Jungle. Only about two years later he came out The Mummy, the first of three films in the saga in which he starred. At the time, Fraser sported a sculpted body and was considered one of Hollywood’s most attractive actors.
“I was shaved. Deprived of carbohydrates. On my way home from work, I stopped to eat something. One day I needed money and couldn’t remember my PIN because my brain was failing. I didn’t have dinner that night,” he recently told the magazine. Variety. To embody George of the Jungle, he underwent a strict diet that took a toll on his mental health and memory.
The change to participate in Iwhale – the first major role Fraser has accepted in the last 12 years – was the opposite, because this time He must have gained considerable weight —about 30 kilos— play in the life of the unfortunate character who weighed almost 300 kilos. Although, as the actor clarified in an interview with vanity lounge, The impressive physical change was achieved, above all, thanks to prosthetics that added up to 135 kilos of weight to his body.
Hours and hours of makeup
“The chest piece was like a straitjacket, with airbrushed sleeves by hand to make them look like human skin. Even the hair was done by hand,” the performer explained of the intense characterization process he had to go through every working day. In the beginning, it happened up to six o’clock in the make-up room transform into Charlie; late in filming, they managed to shorten them to two.
“I had to learn to move in a new way”Fraser said she used a dance instructor to learn how to move with that weight and received advice from OAC, the Obesity Action Coalition, to prepare for the role. “I developed muscles that I didn’t know I had. I got dizzy at the end of the day when the prosthesis was removed because of a rippling sensation, like when you get off a gondola in Venice.”
Prostheses and make-up are the work of the Canadian make-up artist Adrien Carrot —he had previously worked with director Darren Aronofsky—, who is also one of the Oscar nominees the following evening of March 13 as Best makeup and hairstyle.
Brendan Fraser’s comeback
The whale premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022 and the interpretation of the protagonist of The Mummy was recognized with a seven-minute standing ovation. But there, in addition to the great work of the actor, the great physical change he had experienced after years of disappearance from the world of cinema attracted attention.
Throughout these months of promotion, Fraser lost the pounds he had to gain to bring the protagonist to life of the film and gave explanations for this long absence. Precisely one of the reasons that took him away from the cameras was the physical consequences and the problems that some of his works left him with.
“I destroyed my body by doing risky scenes”, he admitted in an interview and explained that he had never agreed to a lookalike being hired to record these sequences. This caused extensive physical damage that forced him to undergo several surgeries.
Another event marked Fraser’s professional career and plunged him into a depression for which he disappeared from public view. He was sexually assaulted by journalist Philip Berk, who was president of the Foreign Press Academy Association in Hollywood. “He reached behind me with his left hand, grabbed my buttock and one of his fingers entered my anus. And then he started to move it. I felt like a little child. I felt like I was having a lump in my throat. I thought I was going to cry,” Fraser told GQ magazine the first time he spoke about it.
“Charlie is someone who is on a raft of regrets, but immersed in a sea of hope. I’ve been in that sea and recently ridden that wave, which has been strong and good. And that wave m ‘also dragged to the bottom of the ocean, rubbed his face there, and found himself on a strange beach in a different world wondering where I am now,” were the performer’s moving words. about his character and himself, when he received recognition from the Actors Guild screen.