Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale

In 2023, The Whale won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling: one of three films nominated for the category that year that featured performers wearing fat suits.⁽¹⁾ The 2022 film is an adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name, both of which tell the story of Charlie, a 600-lb gay English professor, as he struggles to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie. The plot takes place over the course of one week from Monday through Friday. As the ending suggests, this is ultimately the last week of Charlie’s life. Considered his triumphant return to acting, Brendan Fraser starred as Charlie in the film adaptation, earning the 2023 Academy Award for Best Actor.⁽²⁾ Since Fraser was not himself 600 pounds, the film utilized a fat suit, additional prosthetics, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to build Charlie’s body, creating a fabricated representation of what most Americans would likely be conditioned to consider “morbid ob*sity.”⁽³⁾  While the use of fat suits in lieu of casting fat actors can be theorized as “fat drag”⁽⁴⁾—slender bodies dressing up as fat ones for the sake of performance—I argue that The Whale is a unique case of  “ob*sity drag,” a term introduced by Royce Best.⁽⁵⁾ “Ob*se” (rather than “fat”) carries a specific pathologization and medicalization of fat bodies in U.S. society and has continually been the target of the so-called “War on Ob*sity.”⁽⁶⁾ The Whale’s story of fatness reveals how the theatre and film industries perpetuate the War on Ob*sity mentality that pursues the end of fat. With the future of fat in question, it is essential for the theatre and film industries to confront the fact that fat bodies are often not permitted to represent themselves in performance, especially in the production history of The Whale. In its journey from the stage to the screen, The Whale represents a doubling-down on the use of fat suits as a valid performance of fat embodiment, cruelly suggesting in its context and content that even as stories about fatness continue to be told, real fat bodies need not exist.

For decades, the U.S. has been in an endless War on Ob*sity. Warning against the dangers of fatness, public health and government officials have declared an ongoing “ob*sity epidemic” in the U.S.⁽⁷⁾ Through the lens of the War on Ob*sity, fatness is viewed as a disease that inherently comprises overall health, or a problem that needs to be cured. Paul Campos calls this the “ob*sity myth,” which relies on three primary assumptions: “that ‘excess’ weight causes illness and early death; that losing weight improves health and extends life; and that we know how to make fat people thin.”⁽⁸⁾ Campos points out that the War on Ob*sity labels a significant portion of the U.S. population as targets, pathologizing their fatness as ob*sity.⁽⁹⁾ Marilyn Wann describes that fat studies scholars and fat activists have denounced the use of “O-words” such as ob*se and “overweight” that “medicaliz[e] human diversity” and “inspir[e] a misplaced search for a ‘cure’ for naturally occurring difference.”⁽¹⁰⁾ Because fatness has been repeatedly pathologized as an undesirable embodiment under the guise of ob*sity, U.S. society continually orients itself around slenderness as the ideal, obedient, and inherently healthy body type. Americans resort to fad diets, exercise trends, surgical interventions, and weight-loss medications in the pursuit of slenderness. Most recently, GLP-1 medications, such as Ozempic, have become an increasingly popular method of weight loss. The rapid adoption of GLP-1s, before extensive research on the long-term effects of using these medications for weight loss, suggests that the pursuit of slenderness is often about body size, not about lasting internal health.⁽¹¹⁾ The connotation of the word “war” implies that the end goal of the War on Ob*sity is the eradication of fatness, which inherently means the elimination of fat people. With this ongoing War on Ob*sity, what does the future of fat entail? As I will detail throughout the following essay, theatre and film industries subscribe to this War on Ob*sity mentality, particularly in the case of The Whale, which demonstrates the use of ob*sity drag described above. While theatre and film continue to depict stories about fatness, these industries have often deemed fat people unnecessary to include in doing so.

In their introduction to the 2018 Fat Studies special issue on fatness and temporality, Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind explore the concept of “fat time.”⁽¹²⁾ They describe fat time as “abundant and spacious,” identifying that it “moves bigger” and “resists containment.”⁽¹³⁾ Notably, the authors suggest that the opposite of “fat time” is “no time,” which is “capitalist and lean in character.”⁽¹⁴⁾ While no time “shrinks” and “compresses,” fat time “offers more” and “makes fatness more knowable.”⁽¹⁵⁾ I suggest that this relationship between “fat time” and “no time” is significant for performances of fatness like The Whale and what these performances mean for the future of fat. Whereas fat time liberates fat bodies, allowing them to take up time and space, “no time” takes on the War on Ob*sity mentality that seeks the end of fat. No time is at the heart of The Whale. As a performance of fatness, and more specifically a performance of ob*sity, The Whale reinforces the societal belief that fat people are running out of time and that fatness must come to an end. The primary source of urgency that pushes the story forward appears to be Charlie’s inevitable death at the end of the play; Charlie is out of time. By pathologizing Charlie’s body as ob*se, rather than liberating it as fat, Charlie loses access to fat time and is instead given no time on stage or on screen.

This distinction between the pathologizing nature of the word ob*se and the liberatory potentials of the word fat is critical to my argument that The Whale utilizes ob*sity drag rather than fat drag. Fat is one of many marginalized identities that has been fabricated and performed by normative bodies throughout the history of performance on stage and screen.⁽¹⁶⁾ Royce Best’s term “ob*sity drag” is based on Tobin Siebers’ theory of “disability drag,” wherein able-bodied actors portray characters with disabilities in performance. Siebers explains that the “modern cinema often puts the stigma of disability on display,” but said disability is represented by those who are not themselves disabled, performing for an audience that is potentially unaware of this important distinction.⁽¹⁷⁾ However, audiences that are privy to the performer’s underlying able-bodiedness are assured that the performer “will return to an able-bodied state as soon as the film ends.”⁽¹⁸⁾ I suggest that ob*sity drag functions similarly in The Whale as the representation of another non-normative identity by normative bodies, with the added connotations of further pathologizing fatness as ob*sity for American audiences. For stage productions of The Whale, fat suits assure the audience that the actor playing Charlie will return to a slender (or otherwise smaller) body after the performance. Fatness is thus represented by a fabricated prosthetic that is removed when the performance is complete. Especially in the film adaptation, since Brendan Fraser is a well-known actor, audiences can rely on their knowledge that the fat body they are seeing is not Fraser’s actual body and that it will return to “normal” when the movie is over. Much like Siebers’ theory of disability drag, The Whale provides representation of a nonnormative embodiment, but it does so through a fabricated depiction of ob*sity. An actual fat body would not collapse into a normative state the moment the curtain drops or the credits roll. Perhaps putting a real fat person on stage/screen is to admit that the fat body will have more time, continuing to live in fat time past the context and confines of the performance.

Fatness as Ob*sity & The Ob*sity Action Coalition

Fat suits can refer to varying levels of prosthetics and makeup (and in the film version of The Whale, CGI) that have been used to make slender, normative bodies appear fat in performance. Amy Gullage states that fat suits are typically “full-body costumes” worn on their own or in combination with “latex pieces or full face masks and make-up in order to fatten up [performers’] faces, chins and necks.”⁽¹⁹⁾ The use of fat suits to represent fat bodies in performance suggests that “fatness itself is merely a suit to be worn and changed at will,” as well as that “fatness can be represented removed from the realities and complexities of real life.”⁽²⁰⁾ Fat suits are used to tell stories about fatness without necessarily including actual fat people in the performance. The use of fat suits implies that even when fatness is part of a story being told on the stage or screen, these roles are not intended for fat performers. Instead, slender performers perform fat embodiment with the support of prosthetics.⁽²¹⁾ Ryan Donovan explains in his 2023 book Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity that “[t]he fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to lose weight.”⁽²²⁾ In this way, fat suits can be used to tell fat stories without including socially transgressive fat bodies in the process.

The Whale takes the fat suit to a new level, specifically depicting folks that, in the fat liberation community, might identify as “superfat” or “infinifat.” Some fat activists have identified a “fategories” spectrum of fat identity, ranging across “small fat,” “mid-fat,” “large fat,” and superfat/infinifat, reclaiming fat identity away from pathologizing terms like overweight, ob*se, or morbidly ob*se.⁽²³⁾ The fategories spectrum is used to acknowledge smaller fat bodies’ proximity to societal privilege, as well as to emphasize the increasing lack of access to clothing, healthcare, and fair treatment for fat folks at the higher end of the size spectrum. Fat activists who use these fategories typically use superfat/infinifat to refer to the largest members of the fat community; this category has no size cap. Bodies in this category might be considered ob*se or morbidly ob*se by those who medicalize fat identity. The difference in size between Charlie and the performers playing him is likely much greater than the usual discrepancy between a slender performer and their fat suit.⁽²⁴⁾ Charlie’s size, combined with the health conditions attributed to his weight, reflects the U.S.’s reductive and medicalized stereotype of what a morbidly ob*se body is. To my knowledge, every stage production of The Whale since its world premiere has included its own version of a fat suit, which suggests that the theatre industry has not seriously considered casting a superfat/infinifat person for this role.⁽²⁵⁾ A Google Image search for photos from past stage productions reveals a substantial collection of fabricated fat bodies.⁽²⁶⁾ The casting history of The Whale represents persistent ob*sity drag with bodies donning a fabricated fatness in order to perform conceptions of ob*sity.

The Whale also perpetuates reductive and harmful understandings of fatness by adhering to this concept of ob*sity in its story. Overall, the plot relies on stereotypes that American society tout as intrinsic characteristics of fat people: the larger someone is, the closer they are to a premature death. Not only is Charlie fat, but he has compounding health issues that he refuses to seek medical treatment for, including difficulty breathing and a potential heart condition. Liz, Charlie’s only friend (and sister to his late partner Alan), is a nurse who uses her medical expertise and access to medical equipment to care for Charlie. Charlie is, of course, also represented as having a binge-eating disorder, playing into another stereotype that all fat people have become fat because of a lack of self-control with food.⁽²⁷⁾ Charlie’s ex-wife and Ellie’s mother, Mary, tells Charlie that he has “been eating [himself] to death for fifteen years,” reinforcing his troubled relationship with food, while also implying that his weight gain is akin to death by suicide.⁽²⁸⁾ The insinuation is that Charlie’s proximity to sickness and death is an inevitable part of his fatness, rather than a separate concern of other intersecting, compounding factors. As Campos identifies, the assumption that fatness is inherently linked to disease and death is a facet of the ob*sity myth, the driving force of the War on Ob*sity.

These fears for Charlie’s proximity to death are confirmed when both the play and the film heavily imply that Charlie dies at the end. In her first scene with Charlie, Ellie cruelly demands that Charlie stand up and walk to her. When Charlie reaches for his walker to support himself, Ellie says, “Without that thing. Just stand up, and come over here.” Without his mobility aid, Charlie is unable to stand up. He lies back on the couch “wincing from the pain” and “wheezing loudly.”⁽²⁹⁾ At the end of the story, Charlie stands up to walk across the room to Ellie, answering her request from before. He rips the oxygen tube out of his nose and “with a huge amount of effort and pain, [he] manages to stand up.”⁽³⁰⁾ The final stage directions of the playscript describe: “Charlie looks up. The waves [sound effect of waves] cut off. A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.”⁽³¹⁾ In the film’s depiction of this moment, the camera focuses on Charlie’s feet as they levitate off the floor. Charlie floats towards a white, heavenly light. After a brief flashback to Charlie and Ellie on the beach years earlier, long before Charlie gained the majority of his weight, the credits roll.⁽³²⁾ Both versions of the story imply that Charlie dies from ob*sity and its supposed inherently related health conditions. By refusing to seek medical treatment and refusing to pursue weight loss, Charlie’s story becomes a cautionary tale for what

might happen if ob*sity goes untreated, supporting the American ob*sity myth.

 Another facet of the script that evokes a strong association with ob*sity rather than fat is Hunter’s specification that Charlie is “around six hundred pounds.”⁽³³⁾ First airing during the world premiere run of The Whale, the TLC (The Learning Channel) reality show My 600-lb Life has become a significant source for the medicalization and pathologization of superfat/infinifatness as morbid ob*sity. The show, now thirteen seasons strong, features people who weigh around 600 pounds as they pursue weight loss via bariatric weight-loss surgery. My 600-lb Life makes a spectacle of superfat/infinifat bodies. As fat studies scholar May Friedman describes, the show invites the audience to “gawk at super sized people, to see them as inherently abject and impossible.”⁽³⁴⁾ Prominent fat activist Aubrey Gordon explains that My 600-lb Life treats its subjects “as freakshows, displaying their bodies and medical struggles to fuel audiences’ disgust, revulsion, and sense of superiority,” reassuring those who are not superfat/infinifat: “At least I’m not that fat.”⁽³⁵⁾ 

My 600-lb Life explicitly perpetuates the War on Ob*sity mentality. Melissa Zimdars says in her 2019 book Watching our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Ob*sity Epidemic” that My 600-lb Life determines its subjects to be “medically ob*se” and “in need of help beyond the health and lifestyle recommendations of diet and exercise.”⁽³⁶⁾ Zimdars also points out that while many individuals featured on the show “do not yet have—and maybe never will have—most of the ‘ob*sity-related diseases’ discussed by doctors,” they are automatically depicted as “diseased” or “at risk for disease” simply for their size alone.⁽³⁷⁾ Weight loss and weight-loss surgery are deemed the only hope in the face of such a deadly disease. In her blog post titled “Our 600 Pound Lives,” Ash Nischuk of The Fat Lip recounts receiving an email from the My 600-lb Life casting office, despite being “vocally fat positive on the internet for over 15 years.”⁽³⁸⁾ The casting agent explains to Nischuk that the show “follows the lives of real people as they embark on a road to better health” and that, “[i]f approved by the show’s physician,” she could be one of the lucky “selected individuals” who also “receive Gastric Bypass Surgery.”⁽³⁹⁾ Nischuk asserts that the producers and doctors of My 600-lb Life insist to the fat subjects on the show that if they do not take this opportunity to change their lives, they will die: “Unequivocally. This is your only option to stay alive.”⁽⁴⁰⁾ In order for their lives to be saved, participants must “reveal [their] most vulnerable moments—[their] greatest emotional and physical struggles—to a national audience.”⁽⁴¹⁾ This televised spectacle serves the War on Ob*sity mentality, “profit[ing] off of its audience’s fear of fatness and disability.”⁽⁴²⁾

Furthermore, as Zimdars puts it, the show “borrows more heavily from the documentary tradition and frames itself as more observational than reality shows.”⁽⁴³⁾ Gordon also comments on how the show “seems to consider itself an objective and tender documentary [emphasis added].”⁽⁴⁴⁾ In taking this documentary-style approach, My 600-lb Life tries to convince the viewer that the show provides an authentic and objective look at the lives of those in larger bodies rather than admit to manufacturing spectacle. This feigned objectivity normalizes and downplays the way the show treats its participants, implying that My 600-lb Life is simply reporting on the lives of real fat people (just as the casting agent who tried to recruit Nischuk posed it). Because the specific weight of 600 pounds is included in the title of the show, My 600-lb Life is often referenced, either intentionally or unintentionally, when discussing this category of size in other contexts or other media. By establishing Charlie as 600 pounds, The Whale inherently cites My 600-lb Life’s depiction of this size as a fatal disease that needs extreme intervention, especially in more contemporary productions of The Whale. Any parallels between My 600-lb Life and The Whale act to legitimize Charlie’s representation of superfat/infinifatness as an extension of this “objective documentation” of the lives of real fat people.

The Whale treats Charlie quite similarly to how My 600-lb Life treats its subjects, making a point to emphasize the parts of him that are supposedly disgusting and to show him eating large amounts of food throughout the play/film. Charlie is treated as a spectacle. Charlie taunts Elder Thomas (a Mormon missionary who visits Charlie throughout the story) with details about his body, including mentions of “mold,” “sores,” and “ulcers.”⁽⁴⁵⁾ One of the several times Liz brings him food, Charlie starts to choke while eating and Liz uses her entire body to dislodge the food and save him. The film also features a particularly upsetting scene of Charlie, in an emotional breakdown, forcing himself to eat most of the contents of his kitchen.⁽⁴⁶⁾ These scenes evoke the same voyeuristic dynamic as much of My 600-lb Life, treating these real bodies as spectacle in order to reinforce the notion that ob*sity is an undesirable and fatal condition. In fact, these moments are not essential to The Whale’s core narrative but rather crucial to concocting what the playwright and creative team imagine real ob*sity to be.

When The Whale’s creative team considered their lack of personal knowledge of fat embodiment and expressed a desire to hear from lived experience, they established an exclusive relationship with the Ob*sity Action Coalition. The OAC is an ob*sity advocacy group that seeks to “create needed change for those who are living with and/or are affected by the disease of ob*sity.”⁽⁴⁷⁾ Brendan Fraser, director Darren Aronofsky, and playwright/screenwriter Hunter all “worked closely” with the OAC, speaking with people through the organization who were themselves “affected by ob*sity.”⁽⁴⁸⁾ A feature on the OAC’s website claims that the organization consulted with The Whale’s team to ensure that the film achieved a “realistic and respectful” representation of “living with severe ob*sity,” rationalizing that these good intentions potentially justify the use of a fat suit instead of casting a fat actor.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Throughout the written feature and the two additional videos the OAC published on the collaboration, OAC members praise the film for its accurate portrayal of ob*sity and express their appreciation for the team’s willingness to learn from the organization.⁽⁵⁰⁾ For example, in the first of the OAC’s videos on The Whale, an OAC member describes how The Whale’s team adopted people-first language for advertising the film, at the OAC’s recommendation.⁽⁵¹⁾ Using people-first language means that fat people are referred to as “people living with ob*sity” rather than “ob*se people.” As the OAC explains, people-first language has been used in mental health and disability communities to avoid “labeling an individual with their disease.”⁽⁵²⁾ The OAC advocates for people-first language to support their goal of humanizing people affected by the disease of ob*sity. The OAC member in the video says: “[Brendan Fraser] is out there talking about people living with ob*sity. That we are not ‘ob*se people,’ that we are not ‘fat people,’ that we are actually ‘people living with the disease of ob*sity.’”⁽⁵³⁾ In celebrating the results of the collaboration between the OAC and The Whale, the OAC establishes that The Whale affirms the organization’s beliefs on fat.

As Tigress Osborn, Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), puts it in her essay on the film, “[t]he OAC legitimizes this movie while this movie legitimizes the OAC.”⁽⁵⁴⁾ NAAFA is “the world’s first documented fat acceptance organization” that is “dedicated to protecting the rights and improving the quality of life for fat people.”⁽⁵⁵⁾ NAAFA represents those who have become liberated and empowered by their fatness while the OAC’s advocacy is based on the premise of fatness as a disease. Osborn explains that the fat liberation community believes the concept of ob*sity “has created tremendous harm to fat people in the name of ‘helping’ [them].”⁽⁵⁶⁾ By choosing to conduct research solely through an organization that treats fatness as a disease, The Whale’s team assured that their understanding of superfat/infinifat identity would only be known through the lens of ob*sity. Osborn observes that in the ten years that Aronofsky and Hunter worked on developing the stage play into a film, there has been “no mention of ever consulting with any fat people other than those at the OAC.”⁽⁵⁷⁾ Notably, she asserts that to ignore NAAFA and the work of the fat liberation community in those ten years is to selectively engage with fat people “who wouldn’t protest [the film’s] fat suit and who wouldn’t interrupt [the film’s] plan to make the kind of tragedy the [Oscar’s] Academy loves to award.”⁽⁵⁸⁾ Osborn’s essay criticizes The Whale’s unwillingness to engage with fatness on the terms of the fat liberation community. While the film adaptation of The Whale did not exclude all fat bodies, the team made a deliberate choice in working with an organization that would support a narrative of ob*sity. And though (specific) fat bodies were deemed important enough to consult with, they were not ultimately put on the screen.

Ob*sity Drag as Fat Embodiment

Fat suits have traditionally been used for comedy, making The Whale unique in its use of fabricated fatness for a drama. Fat suits in television and cinema history have often been used for comedic effect, making fat people the target of endless ridicule, including: Courtney Cox as “Fat Monica” in the 90s sitcom Friends; Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal (2001); and Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996).⁽⁵⁹⁾ Hunter and the additional members of The Whale’s creative team sought to create a representation of fatness that did not rely on anti-fat comedy, a primary reason for their collaboration with the OAC. Hunter recognizes the past use of fat suits in film wherein “thin actors are put into entirely unrealistic bodysuits in order to be the subject of derision or the butt of a joke.”⁽⁶⁰⁾ The OAC’s feature on The Whale acknowledges the history of fat prosthetics used to “demean or ridicule people with ob*sity,” indicating that the OAC “would not have participated” in The Whale if the film was using prosthetics for the sake of anti-fat comedy.⁽⁶¹⁾ However, despite the dramatic nature of its story—and perhaps even because of the dramatic nature of its story—The Whale still plays into anti-fat societal norms about how fat people are to be treated according to the War on Ob*sity mentality.

Susan Bordo describes in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2003) that society does not permit fat people to inhabit a non-normative body size and be happy in their fat bodies. Only fat people “who are willing to present themselves as pitiable, in pain, and conscious of their own unattractiveness” are able to earn “sympathy and concern.”⁽⁶²⁾ Bordo adds that fat people’s pain is often demonstrated by sharing details about “intimate physical difficulties, orgies of self-hate, or descriptions of gross consumption of food.”⁽⁶³⁾ The Whale serves this function. In their dramatic tone, both the play and film establish the conditions in which audiences can pity Charlie and feel sympathy for his circumstances as a fat person. They include scenarios of Charlie struggling to move around his home on his own, expressing deep self-hatred, and multiple instances of eating large amounts of food, enacting each facet of Bordo’s argument. In this way, The Whale still affirms anti-fat societal beliefs even though it is not using a fat suit for comedic effect. Charlie is in great physical and emotional pain throughout the entire narrative, just how the American audience needs him to be to earn their attention and sympathy. Even though Charlie is not made the butt of fat jokes, his tragic narrative ensures that he is an acceptable, appropriately pitiable fat subject. This dynamic of sympathy is made more disturbing with the use of a fat suit to represent fatness; Charlie is a fabricated construction of the perfect fat subject for audiences to practice sympathy on.

The way individuals from the film and theatre industries speak about these prosthetics in The Whale reveal further anti-fat sentiments, particularly from The Whale’s playwright and performers. Throughout several interviews on the film, as well as his guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, playwright/screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter touches on his own relationship to fatness (and to Charlie). Hunter recalls growing up as an “ob*se child” and “self-medicat[ing]” his depression with food as an adult.⁽⁶⁴⁾ He describes that his “weight range is in a more acceptable place now”; he wears a size “Large Tal[l]” whereas he used to wear a size “XXL.”⁽⁶⁵⁾ Hunter explains that when he first began writing The Whale, he “didn’t think [he] was writing a story about a man who was, among other things, living with ob*sity.”⁽⁶⁶⁾ But, Hunter says, “somehow making the main character hugely ob*se allowed [him] to drop in emotionally as [he] wrote [Charlie],” calling Charlie “sort of the fun-house mirror version of [himself].”⁽⁶⁷⁾ Hunter implies that the larger Charlie’s character became, the more he was able to feel an emotional connection to him. While Hunter has probably dealt with anti-fat stigma in his life, referring to the fategories spectrum reveals that his own experience is undoubtedly different in many ways from someone in a superfat/infinifat body. Furthermore, Hunter’s experience adheres to the anti-fat dynamic that Bordo details. Hunter’s sense of empathy grew when he decided that Charlie was ob*se and the tragedy of Charlie’s life became attributed to his fatness. Hunter established a dynamic in which he could feel empathy and concern for his character through the picture of ob*sity he was creating. Hunter’s joke that Charlie’s body is a fun-house mirror version of his own, a comical distortion because of its size, does not reflect an empathy for larger bodies. Hunter uses Charlie’s superfat/infinifat body as a vessel for exploring his own emotions connected to fatness. He created a narrative of fat that has likely never been performed by a superfat/infinifat person and that conforms to harmful conceptions of fatness as ob*sity. In an interview, Hunter states that “this is not a story about everybody who grapples with ob*sity” and that it represents “how it presented in [himself].”⁽⁶⁸⁾ But for some, especially for the OAC members who consulted on the film, The Whale quickly became a representation of more than Hunter’s relationship to fatness. By gaining authority from the OAC, the film became responsible for representing the supposed lives of many fat people.

From the beginning of The Whale’s production history, fat suits were used to perform this story. The fat suit created for the 2012 Playwrights Horizons production of The Whale was built with “foam, padding, weighted beads and spandex” and weighed around fifty pounds.⁽⁶⁹⁾ In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood called the suit “one of the biggest fat suits ever constructed for the theater.”⁽⁷⁰⁾ Shuler Hensley, who played Charlie in this production, describes thinking about how “unbelievably gross” he felt he looked in the fat suit.⁽⁷¹⁾ He adds that in order to better connect with his character, he then had to ask himself, “What if I was in that situation? How much guilt would I have that I’m putting not only myself through this, but my family?”⁽⁷²⁾ In other words, Hensley admitted to his own internalized anti-fatness while playing this fat character and was able to connect with Charlie through pitying him and imagining him in pain, just as Bordo explains. He was disgusted by seeing his body as larger than it really is, even though the additional weight was not real flesh. Hensley also claims that because it was so labor-intensive to wear the fat suit for the role he “lost a good 15 pounds” playing Charlie, jokingly recommending wearing a fat suit as a “weight-loss strategy.”⁽⁷³⁾ While the statement was meant to be humorous, Hensley indicates that his normative body actually became more slender through portraying fatness, paradoxically describing how his body better conformed to societal body norms through performing a fabricated fatness. The production was well-regarded and was nominated for several awards, winning the 2013 Drama Desk Special Award for Significant Contribution to Theatre and the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Play, among others. Hensley in particular was recognized for his portrayal of Charlie, winning the 2013 Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actor and the 2013 Obie Award in Performance. The production was also awarded the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Costume design: another award for a fat suit in The Whale’s production history.⁽⁷⁴⁾ 

The film went through even greater lengths to turn Brendan Fraser into Charlie, aiming to be as real as possible without actually putting a superfat/infinifat person on the big screen. It took upwards of seven hours to get Fraser into full costume, makeup, and prosthetics, complete with skin airbrushing and hand-punched hair.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Due to the extremity of this transformation, an air conditioning system within the costume had to be fashioned to keep Fraser cool enough to perform through long days on the film set.⁽⁷⁶⁾ Fraser describes the fat suit as feeling like a “straight jacket” while also claiming that the suit was so “beautiful” and “arresting” that it belonged in a museum.⁷⁷ In addition to these extensive efforts, the film also relied on CGI, expanding the limits of how ob*sity drag can operate. Fraser explains that the final ensemble was meant to “obey the laws of physics and gravity, because we don’t see that in films.”⁷⁸ Fraser both admits that the film industry has been unwilling to put real fat bodies in movies and suggests that digitally enhanced representations of ob*sity are a valid answer to that lack of representation. The fat suits used over the course of the production history of The Whale, and especially in the film adaptation, have been treated by The Whale’s creators and the OAC as a legitimate substitute for fat bodies. The actors who wear the fat suits appear to feel as though they have achieved some level of genuine understanding about what it is like to be superfat/infinifat, and, in the case of both the film adaption and the 2012 Off-Broadway production, are celebrated with awards for their innovation and dedication.

While Fraser is not superfat/infinifat, much attention has been paid to his body throughout his career. In the 1990s, Fraser was considered a “heartthrob,” starring in films such as George of the Jungle (1997) where he showed off his hyperfit physique.⁽⁷⁹⁾ On an episode of the Variety talk show Actors on Actors, Fraser discusses his career with fellow actor Adam Sandler. Having worked together on the 1994 film Airheads, Sandler recounts watching Fraser go on to “get very jacked for George of the Jungle.”⁽⁸⁰⁾ “I was disappointed how good you looked in that,” Sandler jests, “You made us feel bad about ourselves.”⁽⁸¹⁾ Here, Sandler expresses (though in a humorous tone) that he felt betrayed by Fraser’s body transformation and new heartthrob status. Fraser was celebrated for achieving a particularly conventionally attractive and muscular body, entering a new realm of celebrity. Though, this achievement did not come without sacrifice. Fraser describes being “starved of carbohydrates” to the point of experiencing memory loss while working on George of the Jungle in order to maintain his physique.⁽⁸²⁾ Fraser would eventually undergo several surgeries to address injuries he sustained while performing stunts for films such as The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), pushing his body beyond its limits for the sake of his acting career. Fraser’s heartthrob status ultimately came at the cost of overworking and harming his body, negatively impacting his well-being for years after the fact.

Despite continuing to act in film and television consistently through the 2000s and 2010s, Fraser seemed to fall into the periphery of the public eye. A 2018 GQ feature by Zach Baron titled “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” acknowledged Fraser’s retreat from mainstream fame and reignited public interest in Fraser and his career.⁽⁸³⁾ Guy Webster, in a 2021 Kill Your Darlings article, notes that the new attention Fraser was receiving also reignited a “weird, though wholly unsurprising, preoccupation with [Fraser’s] body.”⁽⁸⁴⁾ In the GQ feature, Baron describes Fraser’s appearance, detailing the stubble on his “once mighty chin” and how his shirt “draped indifferently over the once mighty body.”⁽⁸⁵⁾ Webster was struck by Baron’s word choice, claiming Baron “focus[ed] this shared memory on Fraser’s body in a way that emphasises what has been lost.”⁽⁸⁶⁾ Fraser’s failure to conform to the Hollywood body ideals he once exemplified inevitably became a talking point around his “comeback.” Webster reports social media posts comparing images of Fraser’s current body with images from George of the Jungle “with unoriginal captions like ‘oh god, what happened?’”⁽⁸⁷⁾ Fraser’s body has inevitably and understandably changed since the 90s, due to (among other factors) his injuries, aging, and no longer starving himself to maintain his hyperfit figure. And this change—much like his first transformation—could not go without comment from the media.

Moreover, Fraser intentionally gained weight in preparation for The Whale, a further bodily transgression as he entered proximity to Charlie’s fatness. While Fraser explains that his “weight has been all over the map,” he is still significantly smaller than Charlie is intended to be, even after gaining weight for the role.⁽⁸⁸⁾ In her essay on the film, Tigress Osborn calls Fraser “Hollywood fat,” recognizing that while he is “larger now than he was in his 1990s heartthrob heyday,” he is still “several hundred pounds smaller” than Charlie.⁽⁸⁹⁾ Fraser admitted that his weight gain did not result in him becoming Charlie’s size and, thus, he wore a fat suit; his body and the fat suit “worked together” to become Charlie, Fraser describes.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Fraser has faced anti-fatness for his “Hollywood fat” body, but he does not have the embodied experience of the anti-fatness that superfat/infinifat people face. If Fraser’s weight gain was part of his attempt to gain a better understanding of fat embodiment, earning some sense of authority to represent fat people, this blatantly disregards the nuance of experiences across different sizes that the fategories spectrum signifies. This conflation mirrors Hunter’s failure to acknowledge important differences along the fategories spectrum. Yet, Fraser’s performance as Charlie has been treated as a genuine and respectful representation of superfat/infinifat lives, and Fraser has been rewarded for his dedication.⁽⁹¹⁾ While Osborn admits that Frazer “ooze[d] good intention” throughout his press tour, conveying that he “felt totally committed to getting this right,” his performance as Charlie did not challenge harmful, normative ideas about fatness.⁽⁹²⁾ This was still a performance of ob*sity drag.

Queer/ed Fat Timelines

In the article “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time,” authors Jami McFarland, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor consider how fat bodies are “queer/ed” by their failure to conform to heteronormative timelines.⁽⁹³⁾ Fat bodies are rendered queer in their relationship to heteronormative time. The authors focus on the heteronormative milestones of “marriage, reproduction/childrearing, and death” to determine how fat bodies are “‘out of time’ in societies governed by heteronormative temporal arrangements.”⁽⁹⁴⁾ The authors also explore the “productive potential of positing fat subjects as chrononormative failures.”⁽⁹⁵⁾ In The Whale, Charlie’s queer sexual orientation intersects with the queerness of his fat body, specifically as it relates to achievements of successful heteronormativity. His relationship to heteronormative family is further complicated by his fatness. Thinking through fat as a chrononormative failure, Charlie’s fatness becomes the site of further transgressions of the heteronormative majoritarian sphere. The representation of Charlie’s transgressions through ob*sity drag demonstrates for U.S. audiences how queer/ed fatness fails to achieve a normatively successful family life, again adopting the War on Ob*sity mentality to further pathologize fatness.

In the play/film, Charlie was initially married to Mary and together they had their daughter Ellie. But then Charlie met Alan, a student in one of Charlie’s classes (though he is described as “only a couple years younger” than Charlie). Alan was “the engaged son of a Mormon bishop” and Charlie “had a wife and kid at home,” but the two “couldn’t stand to be apart.”⁽⁹⁶⁾ Alan left his fiancé and Charlie left his family so they could pursue a relationship together. But Alan was unable to cope with his religious trauma while also being in a queer relationship and he ultimately committed suicide. Charlie indicates that his grief over Alan’s death caused him to gain weight. He tells Ellie, “Someone very close to me passed away, and it—had an effect on me.”⁽⁹⁷⁾ The last time Ellie saw Charlie was when she was two years old. Though Charlie claims that he “was always big,” Ellie’s response to seeing Charlie again emphasizes how much larger he is now.⁽⁹⁸⁾ In their second scene together, Charlie tries to learn more about Ellie’s current life, asking her, “Is your mother—with anyone now?” Ellie replies, “No. Why, you interested?” As Charlie stumbles over his words to respond (“Oh, no, I was just—”), Ellie says, “I’m kidding, Jesus. How could you be with anyone?”⁽⁹⁹⁾ While it was the queerness of Charlie’s sexuality that led to the end of his marriage with Mary, breaking up his heteronormative family unit, this exchange with Ellie demonstrates how Charlie’s queer/ed fatness has become a barrier to any potential romantic relationship on a heteronormative timeline.

McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor describe that in contemporary society “fatness and marriage are positioned” as “mutually exclusive”; they write, “In other words, fatties do not marry.”⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Charlie is now fat, meaning that he does not have the proper slender embodiment required to successfully enter into a new relationship. Even if a potential partnership was not a queer one, it would still violate this societal belief that fat people are not meant to find long-term romantic partnerships. Society also dictates that obedient bodies are to “lose weight for each ‘straight’ time ‘achievement.’”⁽¹⁰¹⁾ After said achievement, bodies are permitted to “indulge” but “not to the point of getting fat.”⁽¹⁰²⁾ The Whale’s narrative adheres to these societal rules, punishing Charlie for leaving his heteronormative family life and determining that he is not worthy of another relationship in his current body. Furthermore, McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor cite Francis Ray White to establish that fat people, specifically through the lens of ob*sity, are determined to be “sexual and reproductive failures, or ‘fucking failures.’”⁽¹⁰³⁾ In addition to a lack of romantic love, Charlie is not permitted to have a successful sexual life. Early in the plot, the stage directions indicate that Charlie is seen “masturbating to gay porn.”⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ But he feels a pain in his chest and starts to hyperventilate, unable to continue. This scene insinuates that Charlie’s health conditions related to his fatness make him unable to fulfill his own sexual needs. Later, further establishing Charlie as a “fucking failure,” Ellie says to Elder Thomas, “What’s more surprising? That a gay guy has a daughter, or that someone found his penis?”⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ 

Charlie’s fatness is also implicated as a reason for his failure as a parent. First, the authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” state that because ob*sity is “figured within a ‘personal responsibility frame’ as ‘a behavioral problem,’” fat parents are “understood as making the ‘wrong’ choices for both themselves and their children by being fat while parenting.”⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ Second, and of particular concern to the War on Ob*sity mentality, the authors explain that “fat parents are also charged with potentially (in the future) depriving their children of parents” because ob*sity is associated with “premature death.”⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ When Mary comes to Charlie’s apartment to confront him, Charlie expresses that he wants to know Ellie will have a good life after he is gone, especially because he has not been involved in most of her life. Charlie says that Mary “fought [him] pretty hard for full custody,” indicating that Mary (and the court) did not find Charlie to be a fit parent after breaking his heteronormative family unit.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ Charlie pleads for Mary to not give up on Ellie, for her to be there for Ellie after he dies. Mary responds, “You’ve been eating yourself to death for fifteen years and you’re saying that I gave up on her?”⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ Mary explicitly addresses Charlie’s fatness as the reason he has failed as a father to Ellie. Mary also alludes to Charlie’s impending death which ultimately adheres to the prognosis that fat parents will leave their children in a premature death.

The authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” make clear that they offer this analysis of fat people as chrononormative failures not to “positio[n] these limitations as wholly oppressive” but in order to “conclude that queer/ed fat temporalities offer opportunities for reimagining ways of life and time.”⁽¹¹⁰⁾ In other words, even as they point out how queer/ed fat bodies do not conform to “straight” temporalities, the authors desire to show the liberatory potentials of fat bodies existing and thriving in their own fat temporality/time. However, The Whale does not allow for Charlie to exist outside of the confines of heteronormative temporalities, or beyond the limits of “no time.” Charlie remains out of time: both out of sync with heteronormative temporality and with no time left in his life. The Whale denies the possibility of fat time by excluding fat bodies in performance and ensuring that Charlie’s character upholds the War on Ob*sity mentality.

The Future of Fat

From the first production of The Whale, superfat/infinifat performers have never been cast to play Charlie. For the Denver premiere, playwright Hunter expressed that it would not be possible to cast an actual person of Charlie’s size in the show. “Someone in that condition,” he said, “they were not doing eight shows a week.”⁽¹¹¹⁾ For the film adaptation, Aronofsky claims that the film’s team briefly considered casting a fat actor. However, Aronofsky also concluded that it would be “impossible” to cast a “real person dealing with [the] issues” that Charlie lives with.⁽¹¹²⁾ Aronofsky was concerned that “an actor with severe ob*sity would struggle with the demands of a grueling production schedule.”⁽¹¹³⁾ “From a health perspective,” he says, “it’s prohibitive.”⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Aronofsky says both that most superfat/infinifat bodies will inevitably be plagued with fatal health concerns like Charlie and that they would not be able to endure or survive performing the role. Because of both Aronofsky’s and Hunter’s unwillingness to entertain the capabilities of fat performers, The Whale further cemented its legacy of ob*sity drag in the film adaptation. Though, the consideration of a fat performer in the role of Charlie presents an issue for further (and future) consideration: would the anti-fatness of The Whale be mitigated by casting a fat performer? In other words, even with a fat body in the leading role, does this story need to be told at all?

In their 2020 HowlRound essay “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimagining Bodies Onstage,” Jeff Bouthiette describes taking on the role of Charlie in a reading of The Whale on Zoom. Not knowing the play very well before the reading, Bouthiette recounts feeling “hopeful, since it contains one of the few theatrical depictions of someone living in a very large body.”⁽¹¹⁵⁾ But when they engaged more deeply with the play they “became discouraged,” finding a fat character who was “a relentlessly sad individual in a relentlessly sad story.”⁽¹¹⁶⁾ Bouthiette concludes: “The fact that this is one of the few examples of characters of this size is heartbreaking.”⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Bouthiette’s experience with The Whale suggests that the theatre and film industries should be asking not if fat performers can survive the grueling conditions of playing Charlie but if fat performers can endure the conditions of a tragic script like The Whale. Asking fat people to tell this particular story of fatness is to ask fat bodies to perform a narrative of ob*sity. And the War on Ob*sity mentality consistently feeds on the premise of their fat bodies no longer existing at all. In order to support the future of fat in the face of a war against it, and to ensure the survival of fat bodies, both theatre and film industries must give more attention to the fat stories told by fat people. A fat future is one where fat bodies can exist on their own terms, abundantly expanding in fat time beyond the conceptions of no time. Fat futures are not to be determined entirely by bodies that are not fat or bodies that perform fabricated, dehumanizing fatness. The cycle of normalizing and celebrating slender bodies for their temporary proximity to fatness is what must ultimately come to an end.