Soap and hygiene company Dove took a moral stand on Monday against Academy Award-winning film, “The Whale,” slamming it for starring an actor in a fat suit rather than featuring an obese actor.
The toiletry company blasted the film in response to a tweet from an obese Twitter user, who called out “The Whale’s” hair and make-up team after it took home the Oscar for their work in the movie.
The disgruntled tweeter claimed, “Our identity is not your costume,” a declaration Dove endorsed. In its own tweet, the soap brand mentioned the desire to see “better representation in Hollywood.”
“The Whale” prompted the response for starring Hollywood actor Brendan Fraser as the titular character, an extremely obese man whose addiction to eating has strained his relationships with his loved ones and made normal life for him functionally impossible.
For Fraser to play the obese character, he had to wear “extensive prosthetic make-up” as he described it to U.K. talk show host Graham Norton.
During their interview, Fraser talked about the suit, saying, “It was designed with the rules that it would obey gravity and physics. It was appropriately heavy and that really made the experience of playing the part, I think, a lot closer to what it would be like to live in a body of a man that size, for me personally.”
Fraser would go on to win the Academy Award for “Best Actor” for his role in the film, while the film’s make-up and costume crew received the Oscar for “Best Makeup and Hairstyling” for their work getting Fraser to look like the morbidly obese character.
