Brendan Fraser wants Rental Family to be an "antidote" for the current climate

Brendan Fraser is stepping into cinemas this weekend with his heartwarming new movie, Rental Family.

Directed and co-written by Hikari, the movie follows a struggling American actor who lands an unusual gig at a Japanese agency playing stand-in roles for strangers. But once he immerses himself in each role, the lines between his job and reality begin to blur, often meddling in the lives of people he has no real connection with.

"You could be helping or you could be doing harm, and that's where the movie lives," Fraser told RadioTimes.com in an exclusive interview, detailing that the film explores "the line between the fantasy or the reality and the blurred region in between, and those are the conflicts that each of these characters come up against.

"It's a movie that does poke holes in the entire notion of, 'Is this really a good thing that we're doing or not?'... [There are] pros and cons of doing this and it's just this one person's journey along the way, and all the people that you meet who make us feel that found family over the course of our lifetimes."

With concurrent themes of loneliness and found family, Fraser hopes this movie will be an "antidote" for what is happening in the world, offering audiences an escape for just under two hours.

Noting that this movie couldn't have been released at a better time, Fraser told RadioTimes.com: "It's an antidote for the anxiety that we may be feeling by virtue of just being alive right now. And if it's a balm or a salve or a distraction, or an afternoon away from it all, and you want to feel like you've been to Japan for a couple of hours, come [and] see Rental Family."

Fraser went further to describe the movie as "a love letter to Tokyo," highlighting the loneliness that follows each individual in both reality and the movie.

Speaking of what drew him to Rental Family and his character Philip Vanderploeg, Fraser said: "The prospect of going to Japan and making a film, which is a Japanese film, Japanese director, script written by a Japanese-American, an American-Japanese crew and the experience of travelling to the country, and, more importantly, the experience of Philip leaving the West behind.

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"It's touched with a feather in the movie but there's got to be a reason why he has this wanderlust, something's not right about wherever he was coming from, and he's on a journey to find out the answer. And he doesn't know it at first, until he meets this little kid and this old man, and that changes his whole outlook and whole perception."

He continued: "It's a journey of discovery. Hikari wrote, directed [and] shot a film that's, to my eye, is just a love letter to Tokyo with the address being loneliness anywhere. Like in London, even you could feel inside of a honeycomb or beehive of activity but still feel so isolated and alone, and we wouldn't know it, except that, guess what, probably so many others are feeling the same way but we just don't speak up or ask.

"And Rental Family is a movie that is really less about renting a service than it is eliciting its clients to ask for help, and the help is to overcome that epidemic of loneliness that that we can feel."

Rental Family is released in UK cinemas on Friday 16th January 2025.

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