Nominated for 3 Academy Awards: Actor in a Leading Role (Brendan Fraser), Actress in a Supporting Role (Hong Chau), and Makeup and Hairstyling!
Brendan Fraser gives a career-defining performance in Darren Aronofsky’s arrestingly intimate drama about a reclusive English professor struggling with personal relationships and self-acceptance. Working from home, Charlie (Fraser) never seems to have his webcam enabled while teaching online. He makes excuses and is so good-natured that no one makes a fuss, but the real reason for his invisibility is his appearance. Charlie weighs 600 pounds. Cared for by his friend Liz (Hong Chau), Charlie’s increasingly volatile health and status quo is put through the ringer by the return of his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink of Stranger Things). With THE WHALE — the title a reference to Moby Dick, Charlie’s favourite book — screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, here adapting his own play, has given us a story that fuses love, grief, and discomfort as a zigzag path to empathy.
"Fraser, so good, takes what could be a joke, a flat tragedy, or even a lecture about weight and imbues it with gorgeous humanity." - New York Post
"With The Whale, Aronofsky and Fraser have taken substantive risks, in the name of an insistent empathy. I think, and my tear ducts agree, that those risks paid off." - RogerEbert.com
"'The Whale makes waves in two ways: for Brendan Fraser’s astounding and incredibly compassionate portrayal of an obese man seeking redemption, and as an empathy test in a supremely cynical social-media landscape." - USA Today
"A piercing, compassionate parable about grace and reconciliation, told with truly Biblical force." - Daily Telegraph
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