While filming The Whale, Darren Aronofsky’s divisive new drama about a morbidly obese man, Hong Chau did something many would consider unforgivable: she smacked Brendan Fraser. Playing the caregiver to Fraser’s ailing Charlie – a man so stricken with grief that he’s eating himself to death – Chau wanted to convey someone at the very end of her tether. In a moment of improvisation, she slapped Fraser’s arm. It made Aronofsky wince. He cut the cameras and took Chau aside.
“That was the one time he objected to an instinct I had,” the 43-year-old star of The Menu and Downsizing says today. “He was like, ‘No, I don’t think we want to be hitting him on screen – that’s really a terrible thing to do’. And I was like, ‘I agree. It is a terrible thing to do’.”
For Chau, it didn’t just demonstrate her willingness to go to difficult, unlikeable places on camera, but also summed up the ethos on the set of The Whale. This was touchy material; handle with care. That defeated slap, which comes after Charlie nearly chokes to death on a sandwich, provoked intense debate during production. As did every other creative choice. Aronofsky only kept the slap in the film after consulting a “think tank” of experts, among them the Obesity Action Coalition, an advocacy group. “Sensitivity was always on our minds,” Chau tells me. “But we also didn’t want to sanitise everything. It’s a very careful dance we had to do, but it was definitely being done. I know it’s hard for people outside the production to believe this, but we were so careful.”
Chau adds that caveat because she’s well aware of what people have been saying. Both she and Fraser have rightly received Oscar and Bafta nominations for their work in The Whale, but the film has otherwise faced a barrage of criticism – some warranted, some that…
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