Brendan Fraser praises advancements in makeup technology from Bedazzled to The Whale
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You could say Brendan Fraser has been bedazzled by Hollywood's advancements in prosthetic makeup over the last two decades.
The Oscar-buzzed star of The Whale — who portrays a 600-pound gay professor with a compulsive eating disorder in Darren Aronofsky's new drama — tells EW he was stunned by the evolution of the art form since undergoing a lengthy transformational process to play multiple characters opposite Elizabeth Hurley in the 2000 rom-com Bedazzled.
"There was no small measure of creative intimidation I felt when I sat down with [Aronofsky]," Fraser explains of the process, which also included digital enhancements atop physical pieces worn to add weight to his body. "He was a gentleman and plainspoken about whoever he hired would be required to wear transformational makeup, apparatus, and costuming. For that, he'd rely on a longtime collaborator, Adrien Morot, who approached creating the body of Charlie using technology we have now that we didn't have. Gosh, has it been 20 years since I did Bedazzled with Harold Ramis? That was several different characters who went through prosthetic makeup. There was no need to lay underneath goop poured on your face this time — we could cyberscan. That model was taken into a computer, Charlie's body could be created with absolute control [down to] the placement of pores and moles."
Fraser added that, since The Whale began generating awards chatter on the festival circuit, Bedazzled's makeup artist Matthew Mungle reached out to him. "We've come a long way from when that was created to the way this was created," Fraser says.
20th Century Fox/Everett (2); A24 Brendan Fraser discusses the difference in prosthetics from 'Bedazzled' to 'The Whale'
In Bedazzled, Fraser plays a young man who, while enlisting the help of Satan (Hurley) to win the heart of a coworker (Frances O'Connor), experiences life as a revolving door of different people, including a ridiculously tall NBA player and even Abraham Lincoln.
While The Whale has drawn criticism for casting Fraser in the role of a 600-pound person, the 54-year-old says that, before playing Charlie, he researched a wealth of films about people with larger body types, and suggests that many Hollywood depictions come off as offensive in their treatment of those characters.
"I think that those costumes, whether they were ill-intentioned or otherwise, put quotation marks around a person who lives with obesity," Fraser says. "And it might just be because it [was] an athletic actor inside a silhouette of a costume that was filled with cotton padding, and there's a disconnect. That didn't exist in the design of Charlie. He does have mobility issues, he does perspire profusely, he doesn't look well, he doesn't eat for pleasure, he has flaws, he's someone who's still, despite all of these things, somehow, eternally optimistic. He needed to make a decision about whether to just not exist, or to lean into what he knew he cared about — books, literature, teaching, and being an educator and drawing out truth and honesty from people as a way to their redemption."
The Whale is now in limited theatrical release via A24. Watch EW's interview with the star above.
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