Brendan Fraser Talks Post ‘The Whale’ Movies ‘Rental Family’ & ‘Pressure’ As Well As Stage Play ‘Grangeville’ – Red Sea Film Festival
Brendan Fraser have given an update on his upcoming post The Whale films, including Searchlight’s Tokyo-Shot Rental Family, and also revealed he would like to get into producing next, in an onstage conversation at the Red Sea Film Festival.
“I finished a film earlier this year in Japan called Rental Family, the director, Hikari… is a Japanese American who has written a story about what it means to have a family as not being the one necessarily that we were born into, but whom we encounter and collect in our lives,” said Fraser.
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“Rental Family is an absurd sounding, funny title in itself but you can rent just about anything in Tokyo: a hat, a go-kart and a family,” he continued.
The actor plays a long-time Tokyo expat resident, who takes a job at a rental family agency, when he falls on hard times.
“It’s in the can now, she’s cutting it, and with good fortune maybe we’ll bring it here,” he said to applause from the mainly local audience in the theater.
Fraser is among a raft of stars attending the fourth edition of the Red Sea Film Festival this year, alongside Michael Douglas, Michelle Yeoh, Catherine Zeta Jones, Eva Longoria, Andrew Garfield, Ranbir Kapoor, Cynthia Erivo, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jeremy Renner.
The actor was quizzed by a Japanese audience member on why he had opted for Rental Family, as one of his first major feature roles after his 2022 Oscar-winning comeback role in The Whale.
“Because it was so far removed from anything I’d seen; anywhere I’ve been asked to go and work. My experience in Tokyo was life changing. I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful place. You can’t get a bad meal in that town,” he said.
“Technology is at a place that I think if I saw someone flying by with a jetpack, I just say, ‘I guess we’re doing that now’. Just the experience of being able to work with the Japanese crew do my best to chop my way through the tall grass of learning some Japanese myself, which I’ve already forgotten.”
Fraser also revealed he had just recently come off the set of WWII D-Day drama Pressure, in which he plays Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, opposite Andrew Scott as the UK’s Chief Meteorological Officer James Stagg, directed by Anthony Maras.
“It’s the story of the 72 hours before the landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day on Tuesday, June 6, and the decisions that went into Operation Overlord in light of one fly in the ointment, which was the weather was bad,” he said.
“My role is Dwight D. Eisenhower, hence the very short hair – it’s all growing back,” he said, singing praise for Maras as “a fantastic collaborator” as a director.
“He creates the reality of a scene to give an audience a feeling that it is a fly on the wall, and we’re seeing it in real time. Did I mention the movie is called Pressure because that is exactly what it was.”
Fraser also revealed that he has begun rehearsals for his upcoming return to the New York stage for the first time in nearly 15 years, in the premiere of Grangeville by Samuel D. Hunter, who wrote the original play and screenplay adaptation for The Whale.
He suggested that all actors should find the courage to act on stage. “Actors should get good and scared and stand up on these boards… that’s where it all began,” he said.
The actor recounted a play he had done in the mid-1990s called Four Dog And A Bone with Parker Posey, Elizabeth Perkins and Martin Short, set against the backdrop of Hollywood and the film industry.
“It was a little bit self-assured. It was being presented at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, Los Angeles… There was a joke in it about Steven Spielberg, and a prop was made that had his picture on the cover of Time Magazine. Marty’s character holds it up and cracks a joke about Steven Spielberg, and on opening night, there’s Steven Spielberg.”
“The joke was coming, and everybody in the audience wanted to see what Spielberg was going to do, because they knew it was coming. Anything can happen on a stage, as well it should, but the lesson is, the show must go on, and I think it’s important to get the rust out of the chains.”
Looking to the future, Fraser, suggested he would like to get into producing, revealing that his near 35 years of experience and close to 80 credits, meant he increasingly had a say in projects from the development stage.
“I’m glad to be able now to feel like I can have a voice that’s pertinent in the early stages of developing screenplays. I’m no director. I don’t want to be, but I do have interest in producing and that’s where I’ll head next,” he said without giving any details of projects he is circling.
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