‘Best Actor’ Oscar 2023 winner: Brendan Fraser wins the award for ‘The Whale’
Brendan Fraser has won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for the 2022 movie The Whale. Claiming the Oscar ahead of the likes of Austin Butler, Paul Mescal and Colin Farrell, Fraser honoured his fellow nominees in an emotional speech.
Starring alongside Hong Chau and Sadie Sink, Fraser led The Whale with a fearless performance, well deserving of an Academy Award. A favourite of critics in 2022, The Whale was a cinematic delight that told the story of an unhealthy English teacher who does lessons from his bedroom and hides out in his flat. Desperate to reconnect with his daughter, he goes about seeking redemption.
Speaking about the movie in our full-length review, we stated: “To play the role of Charlie, Fraser spent around four hours of each filming day with up to 21 stone of prosthetics attached to his body. So it is no wonder he struggled to get up off the sofa, relying on a range of physical support aids to move around his ever-increasingly miserable house. While Fraser delivers the film’s several emotionally climactic moments of dialogue with unrivalled excellence, the beauty behind them comes down to the glorious writing of Samuel D. Hunter, whose 2012 play of the same name informed the film”.
“The Whale is far more than just an emotional drama about an overweight man getting heavier and becoming estranged from his family because he is traumatised by the death of a loved one. At its heart, Aronofsky’s film admirably toys with the thematic conventions of literature, art and religion, too”.
Fraser joins the long list of esteemed recent Oscar winners, including King Richard’s Will Smith, The Father’s Anthony Hopkins and Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix. These recent greats join a vast number of influential actors, with the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman having claimed the esteemed statuette in the past.
The win for Fraser marks one of the most significant moments at the 95th Academy Awards, with other wins coming for Jamie Lee Curtis and Ke Huy Quan. Take a look at the trailer for The Whale below.
