Brendan Fraser to star in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale

By Sam Barsanti | January 11, 2021 | 11:52pm

Aux Features Film

Brendan Fraser to star in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale

Brendan Fraser Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris

According to Deadline, Brendan Fraser is set to star in The Whale, a new Darren Aronofsky film based on the Samuel D. Hunter play of the same name. Hunter will adapt the play, saying the story is “deeply personal” and that reworking it into a screenplay has been “a real labor of love,” adding that Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream was a very influential film for him in college. As explained by Playbill, The original version of The Whale is about an extremely overweight recluse on the brink of death who takes one last opportunity to reconnect with his estranged daughter, a “sharp-tongued” teenager.

As for Aronofsky, this will be his first film since 2017's Mother! with Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, which the general moviegoing audience at the time… was not particularly in the mood for. It’ll be interesting to see if his take on The Whale is similarly off-putting, if only because a small handful of people really liked that weird-ass movie and Aronofsky doesn’t usually seem to care about what the general moviegoing audience thinks anyway. (Even Noah, an adaptation of what can safely be said is one of the most famous stories ever, was a pointedly ridiculous movie that had no interest in appealing to traditional Bible fans.)