At the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, Brendan Fraser paid tribute to the emotional support provided by his horse Picas – which means “freckles” in Spanish – during the years when it seemed his career was over.
Speaking about how he spent those comfortable years, he said: “I had a horse for a while there. He’s not with us anymore, I’m sorry to say. He’s in horsey heaven. “He saved…not my life, but he definitely saved an emotional part of me.”
Fraser explained that Pikas was one of the horses that appeared in the miniseries “Texas Rising” in 2015, and after filming ended, Fraser adopted him. “I put him on FedEx. I flew him through El Paso. I dropped him off at JFK. And he came. He walked right into the barn near my house, where I’d rented a stall for him, and he lay happily on the fresh cedar shavings and thought, yeah, well, he I finished.
Fraser, who won an Oscar for his role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, has revealed the real reason the director chose him for the role. Aronofsky was looking for “an actor who hadn’t been seen in a while” to play Charlie, the reclusive, obese English teacher, “and that was me,” Fraser said.
The actor announced that he has just finished filming Anthony Marras’s “Pressure,” a thriller based on the true story of the 72 hours leading up to D-Day. Fraser plays Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in the movie. “Hence the short hair. It all grows back, thank you very much.”
Andrew Scott plays a meteorologist in the film, which focuses on the crucial role weather forecasts played in the decisions leading up to D-Day. “All those conversations the weekend before, from Thursday on, were not insignificant, and definitely made me appreciate something as weird and insignificant as looking at your phone and asking ‘What’s the weather going to be like?’” Fraser said. Be like.”
He praised Maras for being a “wonderful collaborator,” as was Aronofsky. “The best directors are the ones I think are collaborative, who are a band, who have a real sense of community and the good ideas that come out of that,” he said. He added that Maras “creates the reality of the scene to give the audience the feeling of being a fly on the wall, and we’re seeing this happen in real time. Did I mention the movie was called ‘Pressure’ because that’s exactly what it was?”
He also talked about another upcoming role in the Searchlight Pictures comedy-drama “Rental Family,” which was recently filmed in Japan. The film is directed by Hikari, a Japanese American who wrote a story about what it means to have a family, not necessarily the one we are born into, but the one we encounter and put together in our lives. “
The film follows an actor living in Tokyo, who is hired as the token American man for a Japanese family rental company that provides professional backup services.
He took on the role, he said, “because it was so far from anything I’d seen, or anywhere I’d ever been asked to go and work. My experience in Tokyo changed my life. I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful place – you can’t have a bad meal in that city.”
He appreciated “the experience of working with the Japanese crew and doing my best to pick my way through the tall grass and learn some Japanese myself, which I’ve already forgotten, so don’t ask me.”