Let’s do the shameless bit first. Nobody called Brendan can visit Ireland without being asked if this counts as the home country. Brendan Fraser, born in the great state of Indiana, knows it’s coming.
“Oh, absolutely. My great-grandad Patrick Devine’s family escaped the Great Famine,” he says. “He came across the Atlantic in a rusty bucket in the 1830s – he was 11 years old – by himself. They settled in Pennsylvania. The family later became coal miners. His son became a candy wholesaler. He was a candy man. Ha ha!”
Fraser, meeting me for tea in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, speaks incredibly quietly, barely above a murmur. He is enormously nice, but one senses a caution about the interview process.
That is understandable. He has hit a few speed bumps in his career. Early success arrived in the 1990s with the comedy George of the Jungle and the action romp The Mummy. Fraser encountered a fallow period in the early part of this century – not helped by a still-raw controversy – before recently regrouping with roles in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and, in an Oscar-winning turn, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.
His new film has something to say about the insecure life of the (sometime) working thespian. In the touching Rental Family, directed by the Japanese film-maker Hikari, Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an underemployed American actor in Tokyo who takes an unlikely gig posing as estranged father to a young girl.
“He’s not getting the pick of the crop,” Fraser says of Phillip’s lot. “So many expats who moved to Japan are really kind of gigging it. You know – the job economy. Living pretty hand to mouth. And he’s a single guy in his middle life.”
My understanding is that “rental families” are a genuine thing in Japan. Actors are hired as stand-in family members for real-life citizens who sense a void in their lives.
“It’s all in the title, right?” Fraser says. “I learned this business model has been in practice since the 1980s. There are over 300 agencies in operation now – probably more when the movie comes out.
“It raises a lot of questions. Who works for them? Who are the clients of that? Who are they at home? What do they really care about? Are they living a lie? Are they just getting a pass to bend the rules?”
Fraser adopts a stage whisper.
Rental Family: Brendan Fraser with Shannon Mahina Gorman. Photograph: James Lisle/Searchlight
“Phillip is not a very good actor,” he says, laughing. No Oscar redemption is likely for him. But Fraser must still sympathise with the insecurities the fictional expat endures in the slack periods between toothpaste commercials.
“You do get a bit of impostor syndrome,” he agrees. “You have a sense of, ‘I’ve worked hard for this, but I hope I’m worthy of it and I hope that, going forward, I’ve earned this.’ There’s a standard now that you would think you’d have. But the feeling of ‘what’s coming down the line next?’ is always a reason to pay attention in this business.”
Fraser’s family kicked around when he was a kid. His father, a Canadian foreign-service officer, moved the household to California, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Many actors who have had similarly mobile childhoods have told me that the constant shifting proved useful in their later careers: they learned how to adapt, how to pull on different personae.
“You’re assimilating again and again and again. You’re the new guy,” Fraser says. “You’ve got to find a way to pass, to survive, to make your way, to integrate, or to not be noticed, or all of those things.
“It meant meeting a diverse cross-section of people before I was 16 or 17. It did give me a great deal of tolerance and exposure to diverse cultures and people. I guess it stands to reason that maybe I would become an actor.”
Rental Family: Brendan Fraser on set with director Hikari. Photograph: James Lisle/Searchlight
He has dated his interest in acting as a career to seeing a production of Oliver! when he was on holiday in London in the 1970s. He studied the dramatic arts in Seattle (he really did get around) before moving to Hollywood and embarking on the audition circuit.
Fraser first scored success as a comic performer, his chiselled good looks combining neatly with a gift for ingenuous deadpan. He was a thawed-out caveman in Encino Man, from 1992. He was an idiot variation on Tarzan in the smash George of the Jungle, from 1997.
But Fraser managed to avoid being too strictly typecast. Just watch his touching performance as the object of Ian McKellen’s affections in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters.
“I wanted to keep myself and, hopefully, an audience interested in choices I was making,” he says. “I didn’t want them to be too divergent – 180 degrees different from one another – but I think it helps to branch off into making choices that make me feel like I’m doing something new.
“I don’t want to say that makes me uncomfortable, but I feel like I’m taking a creative risk. The culmination of all of that is in this movie: going to Japan, learning to speak enough functional Japanese to say my lines properly and sound like an expat speaking functional Japanese.”
The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, released either side of the millennium, looked to have cemented Fraser’s place as an ironically aware leading man: suave and heroic but also at home to a comic double-take.
The Mummy Returns: Brendan Fraser with his costar Rachel Weisz. Photograph: Keith Hamshere/Universal
There were further hits, but the work became sparser as the noughties progressed. Fraser has suggested that the slowdown may have been connected to allegations of sexual assault he made, in 2003, against a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the body that created the Golden Globes.
The facts are still disputed, but, as Sharon Waxman reported in the New York Times, Fraser “demanded and received a written apology from both the association and from a long-time member, Philip Berk, after Mr Berk grabbed Mr Fraser’s buttocks after a ceremony”.
Speaking to GQ in 2018, Fraser remained troubled by the aftermath. “The phone does stop ringing in your career, and you start asking yourself why,” he said. “There’s many reasons, but was this one of them? I think it was.”
At any rate, he got himself back on the horse. His turn as a morbidly obese man in The Whale won standing ovations on its premiere at Venice International Film Festival, in 2022. The Oscar soon followed. Yet Fraser knows not to get complacent. He remembers a conversation with one of the British greats when making Phillip Noyce’s fine The Quiet American, at the start of the century.
[ The Whale: It stars Brendan Fraser in an Oscar-nominated performance. But this film’s a shockerOpens in new window ]
“It’s really no different from when I started off,” he says. “I worked with Michael Caine in 2001. He grew up the East End. You know his story. When it was over he said, ‘Oh, we’re going on social insurance now?’ He felt, ‘Well, the gig’s up. I guess I’ll go on …’ um …”
The dole?
“Yeah, and when he said that I did believe him. Because he came from a generation that never lost sight of ‘what I came from, where I am, what I’ve achieved, and what I hope I can continue to do’.”
As a fellow middle-aged man with a middle-aged man’s unhealthy interest in the second World War, I express indecent excitement at his imminent appearance as general Dwight D Eisenhower (as he then still was) in Anthony Maras’s film Pressure.
Andrew Scott leads this study of James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist who had the terrifying responsibility of giving the go-ahead to the D-Day landings.
“I did my best to let myself be costumed and made up appropriately, and that’s all I could do,” Fraser says with characteristic modesty.
When he’s not being Ike, he now stretches out in New York.
“I got out of LA 20 years ago,” he says “I had kids. And we had a son with special needs. At the time there were just no services available to kids with autism. So the place to go was the east coast.”
Fraser really is a citizen of the world. A man from everywhere. But his parents were Canadian, and during that peripatetic childhood he spent time in Ottawa. I’m guessing some of his heart resides north of the 49th parallel.
“And increasingly more and more, yes, I do. Think about it. Montreal is looking better and better all the time.”
When I ask if he means that politically, he coyly returns to his character in Rental Family.
“Let’s just say that Phillip has been out of the country for seven years – probably for some unexplained reason. But I’ll let you do the math on that.”
Rental Family is in cinemas from Friday, January 16th