Culture

Watch Brendan Fraser Hold Back Tears During A Six-Minute Standing Ovation For ‘The Whale’

"Girls only want one thing and that's for Brendan Fraser to be happy."

by Reena Gupta  5 September 2022

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The beloved actor Brendan Fraser is once again winning hearts and minds, this time for tearing up during a standing ovation for his new film The Whale at the Venice Film Festival.

In the film, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Fraser plays a teacher with an overeating disorder who attempts to make contact with his estranged daughter played by Sadie Smith.

After the film played at the festival, the actor appeared overwhelmed by a standing ovation that reportedly lasted more than six minutes. At one point, Fraser bowed to the audience as he began to tear up, and even did a little “oh shucks!” kick as the applause continued unabated.

To say that millennials tend to have a soft spot for the actor is an understatement — the actor swung into many of our childhoods in the late ’90s and early ’00s films like George of the Jungle and Bedazzled, embodying the gentle ‘himbo’ with an endearing panache.

But the levity of those characters belied a much starker reality. When asked in 2020 about how he achieved his George Of The Jungle physique on Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s podcast, he responded: “Go back in time and eat nothing but, like, broccoli and Styrofoam. Lift weights until you puke and then go wash your mouth out and keep doing it.”

At the crest of the #MeToo movement in 2018, the actor also alleged that he was sexually assaulted by the then president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Philip Berk in 2003. Fraser said in an interview that the experience was a shock to the system that made him “retreat” and “feel reclusive”.

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If that wasn’t enough to deal with, there was talk that after Fraser sought an apology from Berk he was blacklisted from the industry. Fraser also found himself on the receiving end of memes that pilloried his weight gain after George Of The Jungle and struggled with a messy divorce and the death of his mother.

So it’s no wonder people are coming out in droves to support Brendan Fraser and his long-awaited return to the silver screen.

In the standing ovation footage, Fraser exhibits a sort of bashfulness and vulnerability that is rarely seen in Hollywood actors. It’s almost like… this man is one of us. In any case, we’ll support him until the end.

Photo credit: Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images