Brendan Fraser became vulnerable during a question-and-answer session after a London screening of his new film “Rental Family,” telling the audience that making the project helped him overcome lingering self-doubt.
“I struggle with insecurity, and making this film reminded me that I am good enough, and I always have been from the beginning,” Fraser said. “Why am I going to such trouble? It’s there.”
Fraser won the 2023 Best Actor Oscar for “The Whale.” His comment comes at the end of a moving round table on “Rental Family,” selected at the Toronto, London and Tokyo film festivals.
“Rental Family” follows Fraser’s character, Philip Vanderplug, a foreigner adrift in Tokyo who becomes embroiled in Japan’s “rental family” industry, where people hire stand-ins to play parents or companions.
Director and co-writer Hikari explained that the project was born from discovering job offers during the pandemic. “My co-writer Stephen Blahut was accidentally looking for a job in Tokyo, and he found a job as a rental family,” Hikari said. “I’m Japanese. I don’t know anything about the family rental business.”
The concept resonated as a way to explore modern isolation. “The pandemic really gave us distance,” Hikari noted. “There’s not really a connection between the two.”
The actors 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 inspiration from his own experience as a student abroad. “I went to the United States when I was 15 and spent many Christmas days and nights sitting in the room by myself, as if Philip was sitting on the bed,” he said. “When I first saw the movie, it was a scene that made me cry.”
Mari Yamamoto connected her character’s journey to her own childhood journey. “I left Japan for the UK when I was 5 and spent three years there and then I became completely bilingual. I thought I was British and then I went back to Japan and found myself still feeling sorry for myself,” she said. The experience of feeling like an outsider influenced his portrayal of a former actor who finds purpose in the family rental business. “People want connection, but they feel a sense of being useful to someone. And I think that’s what really motivates her.”
Fraser praised his young co-star Shannon Gorman, calling her “a real article” despite it being her first film. “She has an ability to express herself with an astonishing emotional bandwidth,” he said.
Legendary actor Akira Emoto’s character explores mortality and memory loss. Through a translator, he described his role as finding “the richness of life” even in solitude, noting that “loneliness, is it something bad? I believe it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily a negative thing.”
Production lasted five years, weathering the pandemic and industry strikes before filming could begin in Tokyo.
