‘I’ll let you know a little story about me,’ confides Brendan Fraser.
‘I’m the son of a foreign tourism official. So our family travelled every three or four years, so that the majority of my formative years were spent somewhere new, reinventing myself to new friends, new schools.’
As a boy, the American-Canadian actor spent time in the Netherlands and Switzerland, among other places. ‘What it did do is just allow me a sense of personal security, to feel comfortable no matter where I was, in my own skin.’
Sitting in a London hotel, the happy-smiley Fraser, 57, looks very comfortable in his own skin today. And so he should. He might still be best known for his role in The Mummy series as adventurer Rick O’Connell – a role he is going to reprise later this year for a fourth outing – but there’s always been a huge diversity to his career choices.
Now he’s big in Japan, as they say, with new movie Rental Family. It meant spending four months in Tokyo, a life-changing experience even for someone as well-travelled as him.
‘When you’re in company of a Japanese person and you’re parting company, it is not unusual for them to stand in place and watch you until the last possible moment that they can see you,’ he explains. If that sense of politeness and courtesy touched him, the food sent him wild.
‘When I came home, I felt like we don’t know how to eat. You can’t get a bad meal in Japan, I’ll tell you that!’ he adds. ‘I recommend the tamago sando sandwich from 7-Eleven. Go look up [famed chef] Anthony Bourdain on that one!’
Outside of arming Fraser with some neat culinary tips, Rental Family feels like a companion to the classic Sofia Coppola movie Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as westerners adrift in Tokyo. Fraser plays Phillip, an out-of-work American actor living in Japan, who gets a gig as a surrogate for a company that supplies them to those in need. Want a father figure to pacify your child? Or someone to attend a funeral? Then the agency Phillip joins can provide.
Remarkably, this is no fantasy. Director/co-writer Hikari (Beef) based it on real companies supplying stand-ins that have surfaced in Japan.
‘Somebody very popular right now, Mr. Do Nothing…he just doesn’t do anything,’ she explains. ‘He just sits across from you and eats dinner with you. But he does not say anything. If you say, “Oh, I need a salt”, he’ll put the salt in front of you. He’s not even an actor. It’s a guy in Japan right now…everybody hires him!’
As she notes, the rental family business has become popular in the last twenty years, with statistics noting that 40% of people in Japan have admitted to feelings of loneliness.
‘I think it really shows about how disconnected people are. Sometimes, all we need is somebody to look us in the eye and remind that we exist,’ she says. Whether it’ll catch on remains to be seen, but it’s not impossible. ‘I think there’s something very universal about that,’ Hikari adds. ‘Not just only in Japan.’
While there’s a bittersweet melancholy to Rental Family – making it a perfect way to gently slide into the New Year – it has some choice comic interludes. One of the funniest comes when we get to see Phillip in a Japanese TV commercial, as a superhero fighting plaque – complete dazzling Tom Cruise smile and a helmet that looks like a squidge of toothpaste. It recalls, of course, Murray in Lost In Translation, gritting his teeth as he advertises Santori whiskey.
So has Fraser ever done a Japanese commercial? ‘In the 90s, it was a best-kept secret that actors could sneak off across the pond to go earn some quick cash and do whiskey or beer or cars,’ he says.
‘Arnold Schwarzenegger made a mint doing that. Have I? I think the closest I came to a Japanese advertisement…once, when I needed the cash really early in my career, there was a blue jeans company that paid me some change, just to take a picture wearing their blue jeans, and it only ran in Japan, I was told.’
Fortunately, Fraser’s jeans ad didn’t cause the furore that Sydney Sweeney’s recent American Eagle denim spot did. But he’s all too aware of how fragile success can be. Ask him what the career-reviving 2022 film The Whale did for him, and he answers abruptly.
‘It got me hired to make the film Rental Family! I mean that sincerely. Getting projects financed these days is tricky. The industry is in a strange place, caught between worlds of “Are we consumers of pop culture who only look at screens? Or do we actually make the effort to go back to the theatres?”’
Hikari remembers seeing Fraser in at a Q&A for The Whale, which went on to win him an Oscar, and immediately warmed to him. ‘I just felt that in my heart, I found my Phillip,’ she says.
‘I was looking for somebody literally like him. He’s got a naiveness to him. He’s so kind, he’s so warm. He is who he is as a human being. He was very much to me a Phillip that I was looking for.’ She met Fraser for coffee, which turned into a conversation that lasted for hours as they poured over art books. ‘We learned that we had a great deal in common,’ says Fraser.
The result is a film as gentle as Fraser himself. ‘I knew that this is one to hang onto,’ he says. ‘This is one of those few films that come along that distinguishes itself from all the rest.’ Fraser, who will next be seen as former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in the D-Day drama Pressure, is clearly delighted by this Land of the Rising Sun curio.
‘Hikari directed a film that is a love letter to Tokyo,’ he says, ‘and it’s addressed to loneliness anywhere. And she signed it with a cherry blossom kiss.’
Rental Family is in cinemas from January 16.
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