The teenaged frame is gone, and the famous lantern jaw obscured by the girth needed to play a 600-pound recluse.
But Brendan Fraser’s “mellifluous voice,” there from the very beginning, is unchanged in The Whale, the acclaimed movie for which he has just been nominated for a best actor Oscar.
When Paul Bennett, the Halifax university professor and educational consultant, looked up at his old student at the movie theatre screen this week, the dark-pouched eyes he saw “are his eyes” the same ones that “go through us.”
Recognizable, too, was the vulnerability that the critics so love, and was evident the first time Fraser walked into Bennett’s classroom at Toronto’s elite private school Upper Canada College.
Watching the movie, the director of Halifax’s Schoolhouse Institute knew he was seeing an actor uncannily inhabiting a role. But the big man’s life, as the world knows, has been full of widely publicized struggles: depression, divorce, a body that has had to endure multiple surgeries from movie stunts, an alleged sexual assault by a movie executive.
“You can’t see that movie without seeing a bit of Brendan in it,” said Bennett.
So, leaving the theatre, Bennett was of two minds about what he had just seen: gobsmacked like everyone else by the emotional impact of the film; but also “a little worried because I looked in his eyes and I thought, oh, no, I don't think the story's over.”
“And when you have a personal relationship with someone, even if it's fleeting, you cannot help but worry about them.”
Painfully shy
Fraser was just 14 when he entered Upper Canada College in 1982, a diplomat’s skinny son who was tall for his age, even though he hadn’t yet reached his full height of six-foot-two.
Bennett, then head of the Toronto school’s history department, remembers him as painfully shy, lacking confidence, and “just trying to fit in.”
The low self-esteem might have been understandable at a school that counts billionaires, big-name politicians, captains of industry, and notable writers, broadcasters, and musicians among its alumni.
But Fraser had moved around a lot as a youngster. At UCC he paled compared to the other uber-achieving students, particularly his erudite, classically trained older brother Regan who seemed destined for great things before his life took a turn as dramatic as his famous brother’s and he ended up, for a time, homeless.
There were only 23 students in Bennett’s Grade 9 history class, which met daily for the entire school year.
“So, you really get to know them, especially those that are struggling academically, which he was,” he told me.
He remembers Fraser approaching him after class after a model parliament simulation had been assigned. The young student knew nothing about politics. After Bennett quizzed him for a short time about his political views, the teacher said, “you look to me like a Liberal, most likely a backbencher.”
That assessment squared with his long-ago mock parliament performance. Bennett said “he wasn’t prepared for” the event and spent most of his time hiding in the back of the room as the debates carried on.
Gravitated to weekend activities
There was no whiff of subsequent greatness during Fraser’s five years at UCC. His academic standing was shaky enough that he had to drop math. He wasn’t particularly popular or sporty.
As a boarding student, he gravitated to things that happened on the weekends for amusement. Which is how, perhaps, he became involved with the only thing people can remember from his time at UCC: playing a male lead in the school theatre’s production of West Side story during which, the show’s director later said, it was possible to see a glimmer of the career that would follow.
Perhaps that is why, these days, Fraser doesn’t talk much about UCC or his introduction to acting at the theatre there.
He is not alone in this.
“Graduates of Upper Canada College find as life goes on, it’s not the asset that they thought it was going to be,” said Bennett “They don't make much of it. They let their successes, or their screw-ups speak for themselves.”
As the years went on, his old teachers were surprised by his rise to big-screen stardom, particularly when one of the roles that catapulted him to stardom was a private school quarterback, in a movie called School Ties, which hardly mirrored his days at UCC.
In 1992, the year the movie came out, he returned to walk the halls of UCC again while filming a segment for the CBC. Glimpsing Bennett in the halls he said, “Hey, there’s my old history teacher.”
As the cameras rolled, Bennett asked the Hollywood star, who will co-star in the upcoming Martin Scorsese movie Killers of the Flower Moon, if he remembered the mock parliament of the early 1980s.
Fraser was 24 at the time of CBC piece and just five years earlier had graduated from UCC. He replied, “don’t remind me.”
