Gen Z icon Sadie Sink had never seen a Brendan Fraser movie before being cast in The Whale

While excitement for Darren Aronofsky’s latest feature, The Whale, has been tempered due to controversy surrounding the film’s depiction of obesity, one thing that has remained constant is the utter delight fans and critics have expressed over Brendan Fraser’s long-awaited return to the big screen. He’s winning awards! He’s inspiring six-minute-long standing ovations! Freddie Prinze Jr. even said his character inspired him to become a better father!

“People are incapable of not caring. People are amazing,” Fraser says in the film’s trailer, which certainly seems to apply to the actor himself as much as his character, Charlie.

One person who may not have cared all that much before the movie (but certainly does now) is Fraser’s co-star herself, Sadie Sink. “To be honest, I hadn’t seen any of his films. I didn’t grow up with his films,” she told Variety at The Whale’s New York City premiere Tuesday night.

“Of course, now I’ve seen all of them,” she continued.

Fraser’s heyday as a leading man largely occurred in the ‘90s and early 2000s before the Stranger Things actor–who is 20 years old–was even born. This was before Fraser was groped by Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk, an incident he believes left him essentially blacklisted by the industry for a decade. However, since speaking out in 2018, the actor has been steadily receiving more work, culminating in his new leading role opposite Sink.

So what was Sink’s favorite Fraser film when she went back and did her homework? It’s not the Mummy franchise or Gods And Monsters, but School Ties, the 1992 drama where Fraser stars opposite Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a Jewish teenager on a football scholarship forced to hide his identity due to anti-semitic classmates. “I think Brendan is brilliant in it,” Sink said.

The Whale premieres in theaters December 9.