Is it a coincidence that Brendan Fraser plays a struggling actor in his new movie? 

Rental Family (in theaters now), from writer-director Hikari, stars Fraser, 56, as an American actor working odd jobs in Tokyo, Japan. As the 2023 Best Actor Oscar winner joked to the Associated Press in a recent interview, the role may have served as a reminder: “Don’t get too comfortable. It can happen to me.”

“I struggle with confidence,” Fraser admitted. “I always have the feeling of not being good enough. Believe me, no one can be harder on me than me. No critic, no pithy internet comment can be more biting to me than myself in my private thoughts.”

That’s despite making a lauded comeback for his Oscar-winning performance in The Whale. “I grapple with overcoming that,” said the actor, recalling one of the two times he hosted Saturday Night Live. Producer Lorne Michaels, he recalled, told him, “‘You know, it’s all about confidence.’ I don’t know if that psyched me up or not.”

He added: “Forget everything you know and just own it. Can you do that is the question, the eternal one.”

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Did becoming an Oscar winner change Fraser? “Honestly, I was kind of floating during that whole time without an agent,” he said. “I was looking for that unicorn project that hadn’t been made into oblivion. I ended up: What is a rental family? Which dog do you like at the pound? I like the one with four teeth and one tweaky eye.”

Hikari, the filmmaker behind Rental Family, “gave me the opportunity to kind of dovetail from whatever happens in the vacuum after you experience a recognition like that,” he recalled. “It was a moment of: I guess things are going to be a little different going forward.”

Retreating from Hollywood for a gig that required immersing himself in Japanese culture, Fraser added, “was personally what I needed. I wanted to remove myself from whatever this place is, just for a while.”

Among Fraser’s upcoming roles are Dwight D. Eisenhower in war drama Pressure and a return to The Mummy movies. Of reuniting with Rachel Weisz in Universal Pictures’ monster franchise, Fraser teased to AP, “the one I wanted to make is forthcoming. And I’ve been waiting 20 years for this call… It’s time to give the fans what they want.”

Rental Family, costarring Mari Yamamoto, Takehiro Hira, Shannon Mahina Gorman and Akira Emoto, is in theaters now.