“I love you Griffy.” It was the message that Brendan Fraser dedicated to his eldest son, Griffin Arthur Fraser, during the collection the presentation of the oscars A Best actor For The whale.
The 54-year-old performer received the golden statuette for bringing life to a lonely professor suffering from severe obesity in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, which marked his return to cinema after years in the shadows.
Brendan Fraser moved away from the big screen in the early 2000s, a time when he had a rough time: he was the victim of sexual harassment, he separated from his first wife, Afton Smith, and he lost his mother from cancer. Moreover, in 2004, his son Griffin was diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders).
The young man, now 20, was only two years old when he was diagnosed and Fraser acknowledges that It was a blow for him. who also comes at this time to be the victim of sexual abuse on the part of Philip Berk, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It took Brendan Fraser many years to tell
Brendan Fraser’s feelings of guilt
“When I learned of my son’s diagnosis at 22 or 24 months, I was shocked. The first reaction I got was ‘How can I fix this? What is the remedy? What does that mean?’. It was like being hit in the head with a baseball bat. I was just thinking “That’s not right,” the actor recently told Howard Stern in an interview.
Fraser acknowledges that he blamed himself for the diagnosis and came to believe his son had ASD because of the decisions he had made over the years with his body: “I blamed myself. I thought “Are they my genes? Is it because of the weed I smoked in college?‘. It’s like trying to get a straight answer from a Leprechaun.”
To the protagonist of The whale It was not easy for her to accept the explanation given by the professionals, that autism occurs “for unknown reasons”, but now she has managed to do it and enjoy her son without feeling guilty. . “This kid has the greatest joy I’ve ever seen, and he happens to be my son. I want to know what he thinks, that he’s so incredibly funny all day, that he’s always cracking up. He loves to take a ride no matter where you take him,” he added in the interview.