Brendan Fraser got vulnerable at a Q&A following a London screening of his new film “Rental Family,” telling the audience that making the project helped him overcome persistent self-doubt.
“I struggle with insecurity, and to make this film, it reminded me that I’m good enough, and I always was all along,” Fraser said. “Why am I giving myself such a hard time? It’s there.”
Fraser won the best actor Oscar in 2023 for “The Whale.” His comment came at the end of an emotional panel discussion about “Rental Family,” which has been selected for the Toronto, London and Tokyo Film Festivals.
“Rental Family” follows Fraser’s character Philip Vanderplug, an outsider adrift in Tokyo who becomes entwined in Japan’s “rental family” industry, where people hire stand-ins to play relatives or companions.
Director and co-writer Hikari explained that the project emerged from a job listing discovery during the pandemic. “My co-writer Stephen Blahut was randomly looking for a job in Tokyo, and he found a job such as rental family,” Hikari said. “I’m Japanese. I know nothing about the rental family business.”
The concept resonated as a way to explore modern isolation. “Pandemic really gave us distance,” Hikari noted. “There’s not really much of a connection in between.”
The cast brought deeply personal perspectives to the film’s themes of loneliness and displacement. Takehiro Hira, who plays a workaholic with a void in his life, drew on his own experience as a student abroad. “I went to the States when I was 15, and I spent many days, and Christmas nights, sitting all by myself in the room, like Philip was sitting on the bed,” he said. “When I saw the film for the first time, that was a scene that made me cry.”
Mari Yamamoto connected her character’s journey to her own childhood displacement. “I moved to the U.K. from Japan when I was 5 and spent three years there, and then became completely bilingual. Thought I was British, and then went back to Japan again, and I found myself still apologetic,” she said. The experience of feeling like an outsider informed her portrayal of a former actor who finds purpose in the rental family business. “People want connection, but they feel meaning in being useful to somebody. And I think that’s what really drives her.”
Fraser praised his young co-star Shannon Gorman, calling her “a genuine article” despite this being her first film. “She has an ability to express herself with an emotional bandwidth that is astonishing,” he said.
Legendary actor Akira Emoto’s character explores mortality and memory loss. Through a translator, he described the role as finding “richness in life” even within loneliness, noting that “loneliness, is it something bad? I believe it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily a negative thing.”
The production took five years to complete, weathering the pandemic and industry strikes before filming could begin in Tokyo.
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