“I started in this business 30 years ago,” Brendan Fraser said from the Oscar stage tonight, while accepting his Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in The Whale. “And things, they didn’t come easily to me, but there was a facility that I didn’t appreciate at the time. Until it stopped.” This was a little bit of a theme of the evening — earlier in the show, Best Supporting Actor winner Ke Huy Quan, who once acted in 1992’s Encino Man with Fraser, only to enter a long drought of opportunity himself, talked about how close he was to giving up on his dreams in the years between then and now. And just after Fraser’s win, Michelle Yeoh, another actor whose work was finally being recognized after decades of great years in the business, made a point of saying, while holding her Best Actress trophy: “Ladies, don’t let anyone tell you you are past your prime.”
In 2017, I spent a startling day at Fraser’s house outside of New York City. It was the first time we’d met, for a story I planned to do about him, and it took me a while to get used to his rhythms, which are particular, and even longer to grasp the story he was telling me. Famous actors — and, for a time, Fraser was very famous — tend to have lives like everyone else’s: full of peaks and valleys, high points and lulls, the workaday rhythm of a life and a career, even if that career is more glamorous than most. They get interviewed mostly when they have projects out, in order to promote them, and most are happy to stick to whatever outward idea of them we might have. Hollywood, like many businesses, is a perception-based industry: tell people you’re on top of the world at every opportunity (until you’re holding an Oscar in your hand, anyway), and if you’re lucky, they’ll believe you and act accordingly.
Not Fraser. What he wanted to talk about at his house that day was pain and self-doubt. He was second-guessing decisions, and stunts, he’d made years ago; he was second-guessing what he’d done with his career, or what others had done to it. He said he felt like Boxer, the kind, strong, and deeply naive horse from Animal Farm, “whose job it was to work and work and work.” He wondered openly if he was closer to the end of things than to the beginning. “I don’t know if I’ve been sent to the glue factory,” Fraser said. “But I’ve felt like I’ve had to rebuild shit that I’ve built that got knocked down and do it again for the good of everyone. Whether it hurts you or not.”
Tonight, just five years later, he won an Academy Award. Fraser has always been an underrated actor, going back to his first screen roles—the ones whose facility he was referencing in his speech—in School Ties and Encino Man: there is something magnetic and sincere about him that instantly works. And it did work. For a time, he was one of the most commercially successful, if not always all that critically respected, actors of his generation. But what I love about his performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale as Charlie, a 600-pound writing instructor hiding his face and his pain from the world, is the way in which I can see Fraser, the man, lurking in the depths of the character — behind Charlie’s empathy, behind his anger at finding himself in a place he’d never wanted to arrive at, are qualities I recognize in Fraser himself. He is a good man who, for a while, found himself in a situation that tested his belief in everything that got him there, and was honest about that fact.
When he won, he went up and said a lot of confusing things about whales and the ocean, which I promise you is an accurate reflection of the singular and unguarded way that he thinks. The audience, for tonight at least, seemed to finally fully appreciate it. You’re not supposed to, as a journalist, but I’ve been rooting for him. Turns out everyone else was too.