At the Montclair Film Festival screening of his new movie, The Whale, which marks his triumphant return to Hollywood after a long battle with depression, Brendan Fraser was given a standing ovation. He had tears in his eyes.
Recently, the 53-year-old actor tried to sneak into the Wellmont Theater in New Jersey quietly, but when the crowd saw that he was taking his seat, they started applauding.
Fraser looked moved when the audience gave him a standing ovation after the movie, right before he went on stage to talk to Stephen Colbert.
It happens as the actor is making his way back to Hollywood after struggling with depression after saying he was sexually assaulted and going in and out of the hospital for health problems.
The interview with a visibly emotional Fraser continued. Stephen Colbert joked, “I’m afraid that’s all we have time for,” but the interview with a visibly emotional Fraser continued.
The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser, will open in theaters on December 9. It will be his first leading role since the 2013 thriller Breakout.
Dwayne Johnson said that his co-star from The Mummy Returns should win an Oscar for his part in The Whale.
The Whale is a psychological drama in which Fraser plays a 600-pound man who is stuck in a wheelchair. For this role, he had to change his body and wear prosthetics.
The official synopsis reads: ‘A reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.’
Johnson said in an interview with MTV News that he was “so happy” for Fraser and added: ‘I want him to go all the way, man, I wanna see him on that Oscar stage, and hold that sucker up, and deliver, I’m sure, what will be an amazing speech.’
Johnson, whose fans call him “The Rock,” made his acting debut in the 2001 sequel to “The Mummy.” He played the Scorpion King, and the main character was played by the actor Brendan Fraser, who played an adventurer.
This month, Fraser cried when he saw the movie for the first time in London and got a five-minute standing ovation.
The actor broke down in tears during a long press tour for his new project. This is a triumphant return to Hollywood for him after a long battle with depression.
Fraser has said that this started after the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Philip Berk, “sexually assaulted” him in 2003.
When the movie was shown in Venice last month, footage of Fraser fighting back tears as he got another long-standing ovation was posted on social media.
Even the actor’s friends and fans couldn’t help but notice how moving the moment was, and many of them took to Twitter to show their support.
Fraser became a big star when he was cast in the George of the Jungle and The Mummy movie series, which were big hits among kids.
As he thrashed around the set doing stunts in high-action roles, his chiseled body made him a Hollywood heartthrob. But in a later interview, Fraser talked about how hard the stunts had been on his body.
In 2018, he told GQ that when he was filming the third movie in the “The Mummy” series, he was taped up and iced between takes.
‘By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China [in 2008], I was put together with tape and ice… because they’re small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily,’ he recalled.
In the end, he needed several surgeries to fix the injuries he got while doing his stunts.
He needed a lumbar laminectomy, which is a surgery that removes the back part of the lower back vertebra to make more space in the spinal canal.
But it didn’t work, and a year later it had to be done again. He had surgery to replace part of his knee, more surgery on his back that involved putting together several compressed spinal pads, and surgery to fix his vocal cords.
Fraser said that for almost seven years, he was in and out of hospitals.
In a 2018 interview with GQ, Fraser said that he thought he had been blacklisted from Hollywood after he said that the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Philip Berk, had sexually assaulted him in 2003. This was in addition to his physical injuries.
Fraser said that Berk shook his hand as he was leaving a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Hollywood that was put on by the HFPA.
He said: ‘His left hand reaches around, grabs my a** cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.’
The actor added: ‘I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry.’
Fraser said he was able to take Berk’s hand off before running out of the hotel and going straight home. He told his wife at the time, the actress Afton Smith, about what happened, but he never told anyone else.
Instead, Berk’s reps asked him to write an apology, which he did, but he didn’t admit to doing anything wrong.
Berk admitted to GQ that he had written a letter of apology to Fraser, but he insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong and called Fraser’s story “a total fabrication.”
Fraser said that he thought he might have been “blacklisted” after telling the HFPA about the claim. He was rarely invited back to the Golden Globes after that.
Fraser said that the event had made him “pull back” as he fell deeper and deeper into depression. He said that as the decade went on, he felt “not worthy,” which made him choose roles he wasn’t as proud of.
His marriage was also falling apart at the same time. He got a divorce from Afton in 2007. They had been married for nine years and had Griffin, Leland, and Holden as a family. As part of the deal, he had to pay $50,000 a month to his ex-wife as spousal support.
But in 2013, he asked for the contract to be changed so he could pay less. He said he wasn’t getting the huge checks he used to get in the 1990s and couldn’t afford the payments.
Brendan hasn’t worked in Hollywood in almost ten years. The Whale is his first project there in almost ten years, and it’s also his first lead role in a movie since 2013’s straight-to-DVD thriller Breakout, which has led many fans to think this is his comeback.
The Whale is a psychological drama, and Brendan had to change his body to play a gay man in a wheelchair who weighs 600 pounds. For this role, he also had to wear prosthetics.
