Brendan Fraser was vulnerable during a Q&A after the London screening of his new film Rental Family, telling the audience that making the project helped him overcome deep-seated self-doubt.
“I struggle with anxiety, and making this film reminded me that I am enough and always have been,” Fraser said. “Why am I making it so hard on myself? It’s there.”
Fraser won the 2023 Best Actor Oscar for “The Whale.” His comments came at the end of an emotional panel discussion about The Rental Family, which has been selected for film festivals in Toronto, London and Tokyo.
“The Rental Family” follows the character of Philip Vanderplagg, played by Fraser. He is an outsider adrift in Tokyo who becomes embroiled in Japan’s “family rental” industry, which hires stand-ins to play relatives and associates.
Director and co-writer Hikari explained that the project was born out of job listings he found during the pandemic. “My co-author Stephen Blahat was randomly looking for a job in Tokyo and found a job like Rental Family,” Hikari said. “I’m Japanese. I don’t know anything about rental family business.”
The concept resonated as a way to explore modern-day isolation. “The pandemic has really given us distance,” Hikari said. “There’s not much of a connection between the two.”
The cast brought a very personal perspective to the film’s themes of loneliness and displacement. Takehiro Hira, who plays a workaholic who feels empty in his life, based his role on his own experience studying abroad. “I went to America when I was 15 and spent many Christmas nights sitting alone in my room with Philip sitting on my bed,” he said. “The first time I saw this movie, there was a scene that really made me cry.”
Mari Yamamoto connected her character’s journey to her own childhood as a refugee. “I moved to the UK from Japan when I was five years old, spent three years there, and then became completely bilingual. I thought I was British, but I moved back to Japan again and still felt sorry,” she said. The experience of feeling like an outsider influenced her portrayal of a former actor who finds purpose in the family rental business. “People want connection, and they feel the meaning of helping someone, and I think that’s what really drives her.”
Fraser praised her young co-star Shannon Gorman as “real” even though this was her first film. “She has the ability to express herself with an amazing emotional range,” he said.
The character, played by legendary actor Akira Emoto, deals with themes of death and memory loss. Through a translator, he explained that this role is about finding the “richness of life” even in loneliness, saying, “Is loneliness a bad thing? I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative thing.”
Production took five years to complete, overcoming a pandemic and industry strikes before filming began in Tokyo.
