I didn't have this idealized image of him as a heartthrob or anything like that.
We talked about our families for a bit, and I got to know him as a person. I just met a man in a T-shirt and jeans, and we sat at a table together and read a script.
#Academy museum of motion pictures brendan movie#
I had not seen a Brendan Fraser movie before, so I didn't have this buildup in my head about who he was. Did you have a sense that would be the narrative with this project? The Whale has been heralded as a major comeback for Brendan Fraser. I think the stories maybe give a different sense of who Darren is. He cares a lot about everyone he works with, and when I see somebody who respects people in that way, it makes me want to work even harder for him. All the roles in The Whale demand a lot of the actor. I don't think Darren is demanding in a negative way. It just felt truly miraculous that we got to work on something that beautiful with all of the craziness going on in the world at the time.ĭarren Aronofsky has a bit of a reputation for being uncompromising when it comes to actors. I'm so glad I took that leap of faith and went to New York to work on this little film with such an intimate cast and a big story. So I sent in my audition tape that I somehow managed to do with this crying baby in the background. I'm always wary of situations where you've got no shot at it but they're just seeing everybody so that they could say that they saw everybody. So I told my agent, I'm just gonna let this one go.Ī week later my agent said that Darren really wanted to see me read. Of course it’s Darren Aronofsky and it's a great role, but I don't think it's for me. So I just didn't wanna invest any energy into it. And I had also been really fortunate after Downsizing that I didn't have to audition for the jobs that I got. The role wasn't written to be specifically Asian, so I felt like, Gosh, there's so many people they could cast for this part who are a lot more famous than me. And I felt like there was no way it could be me.
But you initially declined to audition for the role-how did you change your mind? In The Whale, you play a loving if long-suffering caregiver and best friend to Brendan Fraser’s character. Basically, she's very booked and very, very busy. In the past five years, she's delved into prestige series-appearing in Big Little Lies, BoJack Horseman, and Homecoming-and she shows no signs of slowing down on screens both large and small, with highly anticipated projects on the horizon from Wes Anderson (also shot in 2021), Rian Johnson, and Yorgos Lanthimos as well as Netflix’s adaptation of the bestselling 2019 political thriller The Night Agent. She got her start in late-2000s TV, like on HBO’s Treme, before her first film role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice in 2014. Known best for her role as a political activist in Alexander Payne’s 2017 film Downsizing (for which she received awards recognition from the Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globes, and Indie Spirit Awards, no big deal) as well as for Lady Trieu, the enigmatic trillionaire in the 2019 miniseries Watchmen, Chau was born in a Thailand refugee camp to Vietnamese parents and emigrated to New Orleans with her family as a baby. And January will bring Showing Up, indie director Kelly Reichardt’s first comedy, a portrait of an artist’s often-stalled day-to-day creative life.Īll these movies, which are hugely different from one another, show Chau’s exceptional versatility and uncanny ability to grab your attention every time she graces your screen. She eventually changed her mind (more on that later), and what followed, improbably, was a remarkably busy year of work, with significant roles in three high-profile projects all arriving in theaters within months: The Whale-Darren Aronofsky’s adaption of a play about a reclusive obese gay man attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter-opens Friday and comes on the heels of The Menu, a dark satire on the fine-dining world from Succession director Mark Mylod. She was sorry to turn it down: “It wasn’t the right time for me. I wasn't looking for anything.” Into this cozy refuge arrived a script for a Darren Aronofsky film. “I was just so happy to snuggle this little nugget. “I really wanted to stay at home and be a parent,” she said recently on a call with Cosmopolitan. It was still a strange, scary time: Coronavirus vaccines weren’t yet readily available, the film industry was just emerging from lockdown, and she’d just had her first child at age 41. Like a good chunk of us in early 2021, Hong Chau didn’t feel like going back to work.
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