By Rollo Ross and Danielle Broadway<\/p>\n
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Actor Brendan Fraser had never heard of a Japanese \u201crental family\u201d service before working on the comedy-drama film \u201cRental Family.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no idea that such a place was existent. But as it goes, they\u2019ve been around since the \u201980s,\u201d Fraser said, referring to the professional stand-in service that provides clients with actors who can portray family members or friends at weddings and other events and also offers platonic companionship.<\/p>\n
\u201cRental Family,\u201d distributed by Searchlight Pictures, arrives in theaters on November 21.<\/p>\n
\u201cMental health issues are stigmatized no matter where you go,\u201d said Fraser, the American-Canadian who won the best actor Oscar for his role in the 2022 film \u201cThe Whale.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he emphasized that mental health issues often go unaddressed in Japan, and so he thought that a rental family service serves a purpose there.<\/p>\n
In the film, Fraser portrays an actor named Phillip Vandarploeug, the only non-Japanese person at his \u201crental family\u201d workplace in Japan, who pretends to be a little girl\u2019s real-life father to help her get into a prestigious school.<\/p>\n
While Phillip is hired by the girl\u2019s mother, the girl \u00a0\u2013 played by Shannon Mahina Gorman \u2013 has no idea that an actor has been hired as her temporary father.<\/p>\n
Phillip also takes on different roles playing husbands, fathers, best friends and even a journalist for a dried-up celebrity.<\/p>\n
Fraser, who is also an executive producer of the film, speaks beginning-level Japanese in the movie. But in real life, his proficiency is not even at that level, he said. While in Japan, he said he used a translation machine and that he once told a waitress he was having his period, rather than that he wanted to order a coffee.<\/p>\n
\u201cI made the effort,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Actor Mari Yamamoto, who plays a fellow agency worker named Aiko, said that when her friends and family watched the movie at the Tokyo Film Festival, they could hear only sniffling and laughter in the theater \u2013 which she took as a good sign.<\/p>\n
\u201cJapanese people don\u2019t scream at a Beyonce concert, so I just have to let you know it\u2019s really hard to read, so I think a little sniffling meant it was incredible. That\u2019s how I interpret it,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Danielle Broadway and Rollo Ross in Los Angeles; Editing by Matthew Lewis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rollo Ross and Danielle Broadway LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Actor Brendan Fraser had never heard of a Japanese…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-142416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}