He used five bags of ice per day to manage the temperature inside the suit. The physical demands of the role were, in their way, as demanding as the stunt work of the Mummy era had been — different in kind, equally real in terms of what they asked of his body.
## The Film Itself: What The Whale Was Asking
The Whale (2022) — the A24 production based on Hunter’s play, directed by Aronofsky, with a screenplay by Hunter himself — was a film that understood it was doing something difficult.
The question it was asking, in essentially every scene, was whether the audience could sit with Charlie long enough to understand why he was making the choices he was making. Charlie’s refusal to seek medical help, his insistence on eating himself to death, could be read as self-indulgent passivity — a man who simply gave up. The film’s project was to resist that reading, or at least to complicate it so thoroughly that the simplistic version became impossible to hold. Charlie is not passive; he is actively, purposefully choosing a specific kind of end. Whether that choice is understandable is the question the film is designed to produce in the audience, not answer for them.
Sadie Sink played Ellie, his teenage daughter. Hong Chau played Liz, his friend and nurse. Ty Simpkins played Thomas, a young missionary who becomes entangled in Charlie’s final days. The ensemble was strong across the board — Chau’s work in particular received significant critical attention and eventually an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.