Brendan Fraser’s been adding to his filmography consistently over the years, but there’s no denying that his latest film, The Whale, is unlike anything we’ve seen from him before. (Unlike anything we’ve seen from all actors, for that matter.)

Fraser leads Darren Aronofsky’s screen adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play, The Whale. He stars as Charlie, a housebound English teacher living with severe obesity. With limited time left, Charlie’s eager to reconnect with his family and find salvation, but that means facing decades’ worth of challenges, mistakes, and deep regrets.

With The Whale arriving in theaters on December 9th, I got the chance to chat with Fraser and Hunter about their experience bringing the play to screen. Not only did Hunter get to pen the screenplay himself, but he was also involved in the production of the film as well, which can be an unusual opportunity for a screenwriter. He explained:

“This is a pretty unique situation in terms of screenwriting given that this is a play that I wrote from a very personal place. And I followed this play around in the first four productions doing rewrites and working very closely with the cast. I think it'd be a different situation if Darren thought of an idea for a story and then hired somebody to execute it for him. And in the moment I arrived on set, I was really just like, ‘I'm just here to help. I don't want to be in anybody's way. I just want to be a resource for everybody,’ and I hope I was.”

Fraser confirmed Hunter’s involvement was indeed an invaluable resource, and also emphasized the importance of getting the opportunity to rehearse the material prior to filming:

“We had three weeks to rehearse this. That's quite unheard of when making a feature film. So A24 was really generous with that amount of time. Day one Darren declared us a theater company and we took to the rehearsal space with a taped out floor of the apartment, a one-to-one sizing, and we approached it as would [Sam's] production when it was on stage. We learned how to play the part before we actually got to the built set because it will be such tight conditions and, you know, a film set’s quite cluttered and sometimes like a submarine crew, really. We’d be on top of each other, but we already knew what the story was.”

In addition to rehearsal, Fraser prepped for the film by working extensively with the Obesity Action Coalition, an online support group for those living with obesity. While the specifics he learned may not be conveyed via dialogue in the film, that information significantly informed his performance. He explained:

“Those that I was in touch with gave me the most vulnerable and sincere stories, their testimonial about what their life [is] now, as it was when they were children, and what their hopes were. These [were] people who were possibly awaiting a bariatric procedure, who had one. At any rate, they were people who either had gone through a huge transition or they're about to where they're stuck somewhere in between. And for what I learned from them was we're all just people at the end of the day. We all are. And it's difficult to connect with those that we love the most when we are confronted by [with] society does its very best to dismiss them. This is a story that lets us look inside Charlie's apartment. It opens the door and invites us in to see who he is and the challenges he has. I felt that everything I learned by that consultation definitely informed who Charlie was.”

While The Whale is quite different from Fraser’s previous films and shows, he noted that any past opportunity that involved any sort of physical effort came in handy when tackling the role. Here’s how he put it:

“Anything that I had to do where it required effort, physical effort. Action films and comedy sequences and stunts and all of that, that can be painted with a pretty broad brush, but it taught me to come from a place of just using the body. Charlie needed to do a deadlift like an Olympic athlete every time he stood up, and the gear that I was wearing, the apparatus and the makeup, while it was cumbersome, it was necessary to sell the gravity that he would have to live with. I know that probably in the movies that I've made in that way, in terms of having a real objective to sell a character's physicality and his body, all those types of roles all came into play when we did Charlie.”

Fraser has previously described the experience of making The Whale as an “intensely personal journey” that had him come “out the other side transformed,” so I opted to ask him how that transformation might impact the roles and projects he takes moving forward. Here’s what he said:

“The hope is that you’ll find material that's meaningful to not only everyone creating it, but your audience too. That can be a big ask sometimes when looking for something interesting to do. I just know that I feel I have been changed in a sense that I really want to work on projects that, honestly, I just care more about. I love to make people laugh. I love to have something exciting or interesting or innovative happen when I work on a film, but if there's something there that can speak to a broader common humanity that we all share, I want to be a part of something like that.”

Looking for more from Fraser and Hunter on their experience making The Whale? You can find just that in our full conversation in the video at the top of this article!