Charles Fleischer: The Man in the Rabbit Suit
For most of the shoot of *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* at Elstree Studios, there was a grown man in a full-body rabbit costume standing just outside the frame, shouting his lines into a microphone. Nobody had asked him to do this. Charles Fleischer had gone to the costume department and requested the suit himself, on the grounds that an actor in a live-action film wears a costume, so an actor voicing an animated rabbit should too. Crew members from a nearby production reportedly could not make sense of the sight. Bob Hoskins, who had to spend the film acting opposite empty air, later thanked him: it had helped him see Roger.
Medicine, Then Drama
Fleischer was born on 27 August 1950 in Washington, D.C. He began by studying medicine at Southampton College, part of Long Island University, then abandoned it for acting at the Goodman School of Drama, attached to the Art Institute of Chicago and now part of DePaul University. The abandoned science degree is not incidental to his story; it comes back forty years later.
He went out on the comedy club circuit and surfaced on television early. On 15 January 1973 he appeared on *Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In*, performing on homemade musical instruments. *The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson* followed on 15 May 1974, and he became a regular on *Keep on Truckin'*. His stand-up was character-driven and surreal — a comic who worked by populating a stage with voices rather than telling jokes in his own.
How the Rabbit Happened
Robert Zemeckis saw that act and remembered it. Fleischer was first brought in for something menial: reading the rabbit's lines off-camera so that actors auditioning for the detective Eddie Valiant would have something to play against. Zemeckis then simply hired the reader.
Fleischer built the voice analytically rather than by instinct. He worked from the script, from Roger's physical design, and from the character's proportions — reasoning that size determines pitch and emotional range, so a small rabbit's voice had to sit in a particular place. The production wanted a speech impediment; the animation director Richard Williams held that nearly every good cartoon character has one. Out of that came Roger's stammered "p-p-p-p-please," which Zemeckis filmed Fleischer performing so the animators could match the mouth to the noise.
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His term for the technique was Trans-Projectional Acting: standing off-camera with a microphone, watching the live actors, projecting himself into the empty space where Roger would eventually be drawn, and matching his timing and physicality to theirs so that the reactions on both sides were real. "Just like doing a regular movie, except I was off-camera," is his flat description of it. Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit was added in post-production; during principal photography Betsy Brantley played the part on set.
His attachment to the character is unsentimental and personal. "The essence of Roger Rabbit is the closest to who I am. I am a stand-up comedian, I make people laugh and that is what I love to do." Asked what he admired about Roger, he answered in six words: "the fact that he makes people laugh."
A Long Character Career
Fleischer reprised Roger in the theatrical shorts *Tummy Trouble* and *Rollercoaster Rabbit* — the latter attached to *Dick Tracy*, giving him what he calls a double billing — and in various Disney appearances since. His live-action credits run from *A Nightmare on Elm Street* and *Back to the Future Part II* to David Fincher's *Zodiac*, which let him work in a register with no jokes in it at all. He has voiced work in *The Polar Express*, *Rango* and *Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers*, and on television played Carvelli in *Welcome Back, Kotter*, with turns in *Laverne & Shirley* and *House of Mouse*. He married Sheryl Strassman in 1977; they divorced in 2006 and have two daughters.
Moleeds
Then there is the other career. For more than thirty years Fleischer has pursued a mathematical idea he calls Moleeds — a system of patterns generated from prime numbers, which he describes as a "blueprint for infinity" turning on a relationship between the numbers 27 and 37 that he says applies to everything "from protons to neutrons to croutons." He presented it at TED under the title "All things are Moleeds," a talk of just under eighteen minutes. He says a Viennese mathematician who saw it wrote visualisation software that let him look at his patterns in higher dimensions, replacing decades of work done on a hand calculator. He has also authored a paper on gamma-ray bursts, posted through Cornell University's website, arguing that the universe's largest energy events are not random.
Why Charles Is Called a Genius
Two claims are in play here, and they need separating, because one is solid and one is not.
The solid one is craft. Fleischer's skill is the analytic construction of voices: he does not do impressions, he reasons backwards from a character's body, script and design to the sound it must make, then delivers that sound with enough physical commitment to survive four different characters in one film. Trans-Projectional Acting is a real technique with a real problem behind it — how to give live actors something true to react to when the other performer will not exist for another two years — and the rabbit suit was its most literal solution. Hoskins' performance in *Who Framed Roger Rabbit*, one of the most admired pieces of acting-against-nothing in cinema, was assisted by a comedian in costume standing off-camera. That is a genuine and unusual professional intelligence, and it is not intellectual so much as physical and structural.
The other claim is Moleeds, and here honesty requires firmness. The available record shows a thirty-year private research project, a TED talk, a personal website, and a paper posted on a university-hosted site. It shows no peer-reviewed acceptance, no mathematical community engagement beyond one enthusiast writing visualisation code, and no citation. TED itself has framed the talk with an affectionate wink rather than as science. Numerological pattern-finding among primes is a well-worn amateur genre, and sincerity is not evidence. Nothing in the sources supports calling Fleischer a mathematician, and no reputable figure in mathematics is on record endorsing Moleeds.
What is fair to say is that he is a genuinely obsessive man — "I am unable to get outside of my work," he has said, "it is intrinsically linked to all of my actions" — whose obsessiveness produced one indisputably brilliant piece of screen craft and one unverified private cosmology. The first earns the admiration. The second should be described as what it is.
Legacy
*Who Framed Roger Rabbit* remains the benchmark for live-action and animation sharing a frame, and its central illusion depends on a performance nobody sees. Fleischer's contribution — the stammer, the four voices, the discipline of playing to a space where a character would later be drawn, and the willingness to look ridiculous in a rabbit suit for months so that his co-star could act — is the invisible half of a film that has now outlasted three generations of technology. Roger makes people laugh. So, professionally and by his own account entirely, does he.
Achievements
- Educated at Jackson-Reed High School and Long Island University
- Worked as stand-up comedian, actor and film director
