Brendan Fraser's physical and emotional transformation into The Whale's Charlie, a reclusive professor spending his final days patching up his relationship with his estranged daughter, has been hailed as one of the most moving performances of 2022. But to get there, he leaned intensely on the film's heart: writer Samuel D. Hunter's script, a self-adaptation of his 2012 stage play of the same name, loosely inspired by his real-life experience as a gay man struggling with identity and religion in small-town Idaho.