With his newest picture, The Whale, Brendan Fraser appears to be on the verge of a major comeback. The character Fraser plays in Darren Aronofsky’s latest picture has been much awaited for months, and it appears that the expectation was well founded: the Toronto International Film Festival has recently announced that they will award Fraser with the TIFF Tribute Award for Performance. Even though the award has only been presented at the festival since 2019, it has already been shown to be a reliable indicator of Oscar’s success. Oscar winners Jessica Chastain, Anthony Hopkins, and Joaquin Phoenix were all previous recipients of the TIFF Tribute Award.
The whole cast of My Policeman—Harry Styles, Emma Corrin, Rupert Everett, Linus Roache, and David Dawson—also won a TIFF Tribute Award this year. Sam Mendes, for his work on Empire of Light, has won this year’s Director Award. For Fraser’s career, which has been on the upswing in recent years, this is encouraging news. Fraser made his name in the industry right away as a leading guy in both humorous and romantic roles. Fraser was a famous and ubiquitous figure in cinema from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, thanks to roles in such films as 1999’s action comedy The Mummy and 2000’s unappreciated and wicked Bedazzled.
There has been much anticipation for Fraser’s return to the leading man role because he has been regularly working since the beginning of his cinematic career. Fraser has amassed a number of prominent parts in recent years, including No Sudden Move, which will be released in 2021 by Steven Soderbergh, and Killers of the Flower Moon, which will be released in 2019 by Martin Scorsese. Fraser is scheduled to resume his main man status with The Whale. The announcement of Aronofsky as director and Fraser as the principal actor for the picture was made in January of 2021. Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, and Samantha Morton all signed on shortly after the project was revealed.
Samuel D. Hunter, the author of the play that inspired the film, also penned the script. In The Whale, performed by Fraser, Charlie, a 600-pound guy, struggles to reconcile with his teenage daughter, Sink, whom he abandoned along with her mother so that he could be with a same-sex lover. On September 4, it will have its world debut at the 79th Venice International Film Festival. The Whale will also make an appearance at TIFF this year. No official date for the film’s premiere in theatres has been revealed.