“The Whale” Oscar nominee Adrien Morot has worked with director Darren Aronofsky on multiple projects – including “mother!” “Noah,” and “The Fountain.” 

“When he calls, whatever I’m doing, I’m dropping it and I’m going to work him,” Morot tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. 

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But when Morot first heard about “The Whale” early in the pandemic, he knew this time was going to be different. “It’s sort of like a career-breaker or it can be the end of the career if you don’t succeed with a project like that,” Morot says. “A sane person would have run in the other direction. But I was like, ‘Come on, bring it on. Let’s see what we’re gonna do with this.’”

SEEDarren Aronofsky interview: ‘The Whale’

Based on the play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the film adaptation of his own stage work), “The Whale” focuses on the final days of a morbidly obese English professor named Charlie who tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink) before his death. Brendan Fraser plays Charlie in the film and required hours of makeup and prosthetic work to believably embody a man who weighs north of 600 pounds.

“Charlie is the main character in the movie, he’s there in basically every scene, and he’s surrounded by a cast of people who are not wearing any kind of prosthetics,” Morot says of the challenge of creating Charlie’s suit. “So therefore, if it just comes off as a rubber head, you’re going to lose your audience immediately. It needs to be to a level of perfection never been achieved before – it can’t be distracting, it needs to be [realistic]. And in the research I was doing, I was realizing that every time that kind