Moscow High grad’s work a hit in Venice

For the past decade, Sam Hunter’s story about a kind, gravely obese English professor trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter has drawn deeply emotional responses from theatre audiences from Idaho to New York.

This time, the response came at the Venice Film Festival.

Hunter, a playwright born and raised in Moscow, watched as comeback-minded actor Brendan Fraser received a more than six-minute standing ovation Sunday night after the world premiere of “The Whale” at the venerable Italian film festival.

Fraser, 53, tearfully embraced director Darren Aronofsky and several others involved in the film, including Hunter, during the seemingly endless applause.

The film is a breakthrough not only for Fraser but for Hunter, listed in the credits as Samuel D. Hunter, whose screenplay — his first work on a feature film — he had adapted from his 2012 off-Broadway play of the same name, set in Moscow near the University of Idaho. It’s unclear whether the film version is also set there, and Hunter indicated via text from Venice that he’s not yet at liberty to talk about the project.

The story explores the life of Charlie, a reclusive, gay, 600-pound English teacher whose compulsive eating has become life-threatening. Fraser donned a huge prosthetic body suit for the role.

Aronofsky, acclaimed for films like “Mother!” and “Requiem for a Dream,” had been trying to make “The Whale” for about a decade, according to reports, after watching a performance of the play in a small theater in New York, where Hunter has lived for more than two decades. The director was particularly struck by the line, “People are incapable of not caring.”

Finding the right actor for the role proved a challenge.

“To a lot of Sam Hunter’s pain, it took me 10 years to make this movie and that’s because it took me 10 years to cast,” Aronofsky said, according to The Associated Press. “Casting Charlie was a huge challenge. I considered everyone. Every single movie star on the planet. But none of it really clicked.... It didn’t move me. It didn’t feel right.”

After appearing at the Toronto International Film Festival, which begins Thursday, “The Whale” is scheduled for a North American theatrical premiere Dec. 9.

Hunter attended Logos School in Moscow before transferring to Moscow High School as a junior, resolving to be up-front about being gay. He was voted student-body president as a senior before graduating in 2000 and heading to New York University at age 17. He studied theater at NYU, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Juilliard.

He has written numerous plays, many of them better received critically than commercially. In 2014 he won an unsolicited $625,000 fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, otherwise known as a “genius grant.”

Increasingly over the years, he has chosen Idaho as the setting of his plays and made them more personal, placing an emphasis on character, realism and emotional honesty. In 2019, his thematically linked works “Lewiston” and “Clarkston” were performed at the Boise Contemporary Theater.

Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-8207.