Actors who maintain professional activity through periods without major public success are doing something that actors who move from hit to hit do not have to do: they are developing a relationship to the work itself, rather than a relationship to the work mediated by immediate recognition. When the applause is there, it tells you that what you did worked. When the applause is absent — when the series is a streaming-platform production with a devoted but small audience, when the role is voice work heard but not seen, when the film is made outside the mainstream circuits of distribution — the only available measure is the work itself and your own judgment of it.
This kind of relationship to the craft, developed over years without the reward of public visibility, produces something specific: the capacity to work without working for the recognition. It produces, in other words, the capacity to find in the material what is actually there, rather than what will land with an audience.
This is what Fraser brought to The Whale, and it is part of what Aronofsky saw in the Brazilian film trailer. An actor who has spent years working without the scaffold of public recognition learns to stand inside the work without external support. The stillness that the Charlie role required — the willingness to be in the character without performing the character — is precisely what those years had built.
The wilderness, in this reading, was not simply a place he had been exiled to. It was also a place where something was being formed. What was being formed was the actor who could stand on that stage at Venice and be moved in the specific way he was moved: not by surprise at his own success, but by something that felt like recognition after a long period of not being recognized, which is a different and more complex form of emotion.