Brendan Fraser is back.

Fraser who seemed to disappear for a bit after being everywhere is receiving accolades from all quarters for his performance in The Whale. 

In The Whale, Fraser plays a 600-pound writing instructor named Charlie who is approaching the end of his life and who is desperate to connect with his daughter before he dies. Fraser is wary about overstating the similarities between himself and Charlie, but there are ways in which Fraser saw himself in the part; one of them was in the simple fact of Charlie’s sincerity. “He tells his students, ‘Just tell me something honest. This is a pursuit for authenticity.’ And once they do, it’s liberating.”

 

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He is considered an early contender and frontrunner for best actor and almost certainly an Oscar, so why won’t he attend The Golden Globes, even if nominated? Fraser says, “My mother didn’t raise a hypocrite. You can call me a lot of things, but not that.”

GQ Magazine:

The story, briefly, is this: A few years ago, Fraser sat down and relayed to a journalist a series of things he had not previously talked about in public. He talked about the ways in which his body had failed him after years of doing stunts on film sets. He talked about the reasons that had led him to step back from Hollywood, or that had led Hollywood to step back from him—he still wasn’t quite sure which it was. And he shared a startling allegation: that a once powerful man named Philip Berk, a former president and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that stages the Golden Globes, had groped and assaulted Fraser at a 2003 luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (Berk disputes Fraser’s account.) The experience, Fraser said then, “made me retreat.” He felt, he said, like “something had been taken away from me.” The incident had colored his life ever since, in ways that sometimes felt small and sometimes felt very big indeed.

The article in which he disclosed all this was published in the March 2018 issue of GQ, and online the story quickly became the most read in the history of the magazine.

After the article containing Fraser’s allegations against Berk and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association came out, the organization issued a statement saying, in part, “The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behavior described in this article.” The HFPA promised an inquiry, and Fraser was interviewed by an independent investigator. The organization ultimately came back to him and proposed issuing a joint statement that, according to Fraser, would say, “Although it was concluded that Mr. Berk inappropriately touched Mr. Fraser, the evidence supports that it was intended to be taken as a joke and not as a sexual advance.” Berk remained a voting member of the HFPA. When I asked him in 2018 if he faced any disciplinary action from the organization, Berk told me: “None at all.”

Fraser refused to sign the joint press release. And that’s where it was left. Despite Fraser’s very public allegations about a member of the HFPA, the organization continued on exactly as it had before. “I knew they would close ranks,” Fraser said. “I knew they would kick the can down the road. I knew they would get ahead of the story. I knew that I certainly had no future with that system as it was.”

GQ spoke to Fraser about his most iconic characters below.

And watch the trailer to The Whale below.

The Whale – Only In Theaters This December. #TheWhale