In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser’s character Phillip does a lot of pretending. While looking for gigs as an American actor living in Tokyo, he lands a strange role: “token white guy.” And it gets weirder, the more Phillip learns about it: His new employer, a company called “Rental Family,” doesn’t cast for the stage or the screen. They hire actors—“surrogates”—to play roles in people’s lives, to “help people connect to what’s missing.”
Phillip becomes whatever the company’s clients need him to be: a mourner at a staged funeral, a groom for an anxious bride, the dad who’s finally part of the picture. Sometimes he pretends to be these people for 30 minutes, sometimes he has to pretend for weeks on end. Soon, Phillip comes to love the job he was initially so skeptical of.
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