Despite only just debuting in a limited release, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale has been met with months of criticism for the director’s use of a “fat suit” for his star, Brendan Fraser. But in a new interview, Aronofsky says he never saw any of it coming.
Fraser plays Charlie, a man who gains several hundred pounds after his boyfriend’s death, in Aronofsky’s adaptation of the original stage play by out gay playwright Samuel D. Hunter. In an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment last week, Aronofsky dismissed concerns that The Whale’s narrative and theatrical choices were fatphobic in any way.
“Actors have been using makeup since the beginning of acting — that's one of their tools,” Aronfsky said, and “the lengths we went to to portray the realism of the make-up has never been done before.” He added that he and makeup artist Adrien Morot did not want Fraser’s portrayal “to look like a joke,” and defended Charlie as a complex character rather than a one-note fat joke as is common in cinema.
“So [the controversy] makes no sense to me,” Aronofsky added. “Brendan Fraser is the right actor to play this role, and the film is an exercise in empathy.”
Still, hyping the film’s “realism” doesn’t seem to relate much to criticisms The Whale has already received from moviegoers and professional critics alike. In a review published last week in the New York Times, Hunger author Roxane Gay called the project “an inhumane film about a very human being,” praising Fraser’s talent but balking at how “exploitative and at times cruel” its relationship is with fatness, concluding that Aronofsky succeeding mainly in producing a “carnival sideshow” with Charlie as its main attraction.
Fat LGBTQ+ actors have levied their own criticisms at The Whale. Comedian and actor Guy Branum has said the film and its source material (which he dragged separately in an Instagram post last week) are both “trying to use extreme fatness as a metaphor for gay pain,” and that Aronofsky’s artificial construction of fatness “allows people to talk about that character as an object in a way that wouldn’t be possible if it were an actual fat person.”
Mean Girls star Daniel Franzese has also spoken out about the film, expressing disappointment that he and “the other big queer guys” were not cast in a movie literally about being fat and gay.
“I guess you can go ahead and wear a fat suit and do what you got to do and get your Oscar,” Franzese said in an interview with People earlier this year. “We'll just sit here, waiting.”
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