Making ‘Rental Family’ Helped Me Overcome ‘Struggle With Insecurity’:

Shannon Gorman and Brendan Fraser in RENTAL FAMILY. Photo by James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved. — Searchlight Pictures

Oscar Winner Brendan Fraser, after a London screening of his film **Rental Family**, told the audience that making the project helped him overcome persistent self-doubt.

“I struggle with insecurity, and this film reminded me that I’m good enough, and I always, Fraser said. “Why am I giving myself such a hard time? It’s there.”

Fraser, who won the best actor Oscar in 2023 for The Whale, headed an emotional panel discussion about “Rental Family,” which has been selected for the Toronto, London and Tokyo Film Festivals.

My Oscar Book:

Rental Family follows Fraser’s character Philip Vanderplug, an outsider adrift in Tokyo who becomes entwined in Japan’s “rental family” industry, where people hire stand-ins to play relatives or companions.

Director and co-writer Hikari said the project emerged from job listing discovery during the pandemic.

“My co-writer Stephen Blahut was randomly looking for a job in Tokyo, and he found a job such as rental family,” Hikari said. “I’m Japanese. I know nothing about the rental family business.” The goal was to explore modern isolation: “Pandemic really gave us distance. There’s not really much of a connection in between.”

The cast also brought personal perspectives to the film’s themes of loneliness and displacement.

Takehiro Hira, who plays workaholic with void in his life, drew on his own experience as tudent abroad. “I went to the US when I was 15, and I spent many days, and Christmas nights, sitting all by myself in the room, like Philip was sitting on the bed,” he said. “When I saw the film for the first time, that scene made me cry.”

Mari Yamamoto connected her character’s journey to childhood displacement.

“I moved to the U.K. from Japan when I was 5 and spent three years there, and then became completely bilingual. Thought I was British, and then went back to Japan again, and I found myself still apologetic,” she said. The experience of feeling like an outsider informed her portrayal of a former actor who finds purpose in the rental family business. “People want connection, but they feel meaning in being useful to somebody. And I think that’s what really drives her.”

Fraser praised his young co-star Shannon Gorman as “a genuine article” despite this being her first film. “She has an ability to express herself with an emotional bandwidth that is astonishing,” he said.

Akira Emoto’s character explores mortality and memory loss. Through a translator, he described the role as finding “richness in life” within loneliness, noting that “loneliness, is it something bad? I believe it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily a negative thing.”

The production took five years to complete, weathering the pandemic and industry strikes before shooting could begin in Tokyo.