At the Venice Film Festival last month, Brendan Fraser stood up from his seat after a screening of “The Whale” — Darren Aronofsky’s new slice of life drama in which the 53-year-old actor plays a gay, grossly overweight teacher desperately trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter — and basked, teary-eyed, in a six-minute standing ovation.
For an actor whose status in the industry has been teetering perilously close to has-been territory, it was an extraordinary moment. Suddenly, the one-time “Mummy” star, who had all but disappeared from the big screen over the past decade (his most noteworthy recent role was a smallish part in 2017 as a prison guard in a handful of episodes of “The Affair”), had become a front runner in this year’s Best Actor race.