Brendan Fraser's Best Actor Win for 'The Whale': Fatphobia at Its Worst - The Daily Beast

As I watched at home, I looked around at the audience on-screen and saw a sea of thin people—who likely have no idea what it’s like to be fat—vigorously applauding a non-fat actor for portraying the thing that frightens and disgusts so many people the most in this world: a fat person.

It was crystal clear that Mr. Hunter and Mr. Aronofsky considered fatness to be the ultimate human failure, something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.” Gay also correctly predicted that Fraser would be lauded as “brave” by his peers “for being willing to embody so many people’s worst fears.”

It matters that Fraser won the Oscar for a role that Lindy West, the fat-positive author of the memoir Shrill(which was made into a groundbreaking Hulu show a few years ago), recently described as “a fantasy of fat squalor, a confirmation that we ‘do this’ to ourselves.”

Earlier this year, photos were released revealing that action star and martial artist Scott Adkins (an incredibly fit man) would be portraying a fat character in John Wick: Chapter 4.

Apparently the cake scene comes from the original Roald Dahl novel, but adaptive choices are made by screenwriters all the time in order to make older stories more inclusive and/or avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

To reward stories like The Whale and the non-fat actors who star in them while wearing fat suits is to give their thin creators carte blanche to continue distorting the reality of our lives, painting us as irrevocably broken or one-dimensional.