IN DARREN ARONOFSKY’S THE WHALE, BRENDAN FRASER STARS AS A MAN HIDING AWAY, SHUNNED BY SOCIETY. IT IS ALL, THEY TELL US, ABOUT DIGGING BENEATH THE SURFACE…

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

Test one-two.”

Brendan Fraser is checking Empire’s recording device. By all accounts, Fraser, who was some 20 years ago a top-tier action star, ruling the box office with the likes of George Of The Jungle and The Mummy, is, they say, a humble soul, a gentle man. In the flesh that seems to be the case. Offering to place our Dictaphone nearer to him for a more effective recording, he perches it on a table next to his face and speaks into it. “The red light’s on,” he smiles. A kind smile.

He is friendly but quiet, sincere, softly spoken — yet somewhat intense. There’s a heaviness about him — strength yet also fragility, and certainly no sign of an ego. This has all served him well in The Whale, in which his character Charlie, a man who finds the good in everybody, a man who sees light in the darkness, a 600lb man with congestive heart failure and potentially a few days left to live, wins you over within seconds. Fraser’s eyes shine throughout, transcending the prosthetics he’s encased in.

Empire meets him on an October lunchtime in Soho. Later in the evening, The Whale screens at the London Film Festival, after which he receives a rapturous standing ovation. The same thing happened at the Venice Film Festival a month earlier, where the film had its first public screening, and Fraser teared up. It happens again after we meet, at other screenings in other countries. Each time as the crowd stand up, beaming and applauding, it’s like watching an astronaut return home. He has been away. Fraser all but faded from the industry in the early 2000s, still working, but less frequently, and kind of off the radar. There were personal issues, and a decision to step away from the spotlight. But he’s come out the other side. The Whale feels like a rebirth.

Charlie grew out of the screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter’s own life experience. Hunter grew up in northern Idaho, a gay teenager in a Christian fundamentalist school. Feeling ostracised and isolated, he began “self-medicating” with food, getting increasingly bigger. And eventually he was outed. “I was told that I couldn’t identify as gay, and that I had to work on it,” he says now. “I had to meet with the pastor and have a sort of semi-conversion therapy if I wanted to continue on in the school. I knew I couldn’t do that. So I left. Right as I was turning 17.”