When audiences and journalists, in 2022 and 2023, greeted him with “welcome back” and variations on that theme, his response was telling. “I’ve never been that far away,” he said more than once. “But I’m happy to be here now.” And: “Because we’ve all grown a little older together.” He was pushing back against a story that erased the actual record of his continued work, while acknowledging that the quality and visibility of what he had been doing was different from what he had been doing at the height of the franchise years.
## Samuel D. Hunter’s Play and What It Was About
Before The Whale was a film, it was a stage play. Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright from Idaho, wrote The Whale in 2011. It premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2012 and was subsequently produced in multiple theaters.
The play is set almost entirely in a single apartment in Moscow, Idaho. Charlie, the central character, is a 600-pound man who cannot leave his couch. He is dying; his heart is failing; he has chosen, deliberately and with some self-awareness, not to seek medical help. He was once an English teacher. He left his wife and daughter for a male student he loved, and the student — Alan — died of a condition related to the rejection of food, a death connected to a crisis of religious faith. Charlie’s eating is a form of grief and a form of self-destruction simultaneously. Over the play’s five scenes, he attempts to reconnect with his teenage daughter Ellie, who is angry and wounded. He asks her to be honest with him. He is obsessed with an essay she wrote about Moby-Dick.