It’s entirely plausible that the big Oscar-buzz film “The Whale” never happens if the Denver Center’s late Literary Manager Doug Langworthy doesn’t bother to open his mail and read the script Samuel D. Hunter mailed him on a wave of unlikely hope back in 2010.

“If not for Doug and the Denver Center, God knows,” said Hunter. “I have no idea what would have happened.”

Langworthy had seen Hunter’s play “A Bright New Boise” and, as was his kindly manner, asked the young playwright if he had anything else in the works. He did: A play inspired by “Moby Dick” about a gay, 600-pound online English teacher whose white whale is reconnecting with his angry teenage daughter before his oncoming death by self-neglect.

Langworthy selected the play for further development at the DCPA Theatre Company’s 2011 Colorado New Play Summit. A year later, Artistic Director Kent Thompson gave the play its world-premiere staging. Ten months after that, the play bowed at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Oscar-winning director Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream”) saw it there and optioned it as a film. Little did anyone know that it would take a decade, but the completed film, to be widely released on Dec. 9, is now garnering a tsunami of critical praise.    

Hunter will return to Denver to receive the Denver Film Festival’s Excellence in Writing Award at a sold-out screening Saturday at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

“Even before the film started winning awards” — and got a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival — ”I called my distributor and said, ‘Can I please go to Denver? Because that’s where I birthed the play,’” Hunter said. “Denver was the scaffolding upon which this entire play is built because the Denver Center was the first to say that my idea has value — let’s spend some resources on it.”

Leave it to a man from the Mountain West — Idaho, to be exact — to use mountains to convey the full trajectory of this unlikely feel-good story that now includes chapters on the stratospheric rise of Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) and the irresistible comeback of Brendan Fraser.

“I will always remember walking to our first rehearsal in Denver and seeing that big banner for the play hanging over the wall of the Denver Performing Arts Complex. It was so surreal,” Hunter said. “I couldn’t believe these people cared about my story enough to stage it at that level. And then when it went to New York, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve scaled Mount Everest.'” Which would make getting the call from Aronofsky akin to summiting a mountain on the moon.

All the more ironic given that Hunter wrote the play for an audience of one: Himself. 

“The Whale” touches on many identifiable insecurities including sexuality, religion, grief, food addiction and fat-shaming. In his story, a young door-to-door missionary named Thomas believes he has found his purpose in ministering to Charlie, the idealistic but homebound teacher who hides from his online students by lying to them that his laptop camera is broken while at the same time begging them to write one honest thing.

In this story, Thomas is based on Hunter. And Charlie is based on Hunter.  

“‘The Whale’ really was the first time that I leaned into some really personal stuff about growing up gay in Idaho, attending a fundamentalist Christian school and subsequently self-medicating with food throughout my late teens and early 20s,” Hunter said. “And I really was an expository writing teacher trying to connect with my students.

“So when I wrote this play, I don’t know if it was ever meant for anyone else. Sending it out to Doug in Denver was my first realization that, ‘Hey, maybe this story does want to exist in the world.’ He had so much faith in me and the script. I will be forever grateful to him for that.”

‘Cynicism is easy. But having faith in other people is hard work that takes effort. And it actually pays off.’ – Samuel D. Hunter

The most astonishing of the many astonishing things about “The Whale” is watching Fraser live so authentically inside this morbidly obese, self-damaging but still positive, even romantic character and realizing he’s neither an anomaly nor carnival curiosity. I am not 600 pounds, and yet I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen a character in any film that I felt reflected me in so many different ways as this 600-pound human whale.

“That’s exactly what I hoped the takeaway would be,” Hunter said. “With any character, you hope that people see themselves. But especially with this one, just because he does come from such a personal and vulnerable place. I think that cynicism is easy — and perversely comforting. But having faith in other people is hard work that takes effort. And it actually pays off.”

Those who saw the play in Denver should be interested to know that the film stays remarkably true to the play. There is only one significant new character. (Be prepared for the pizza-delivery guy.) The story largely stays in Charlie’s apartment, resisting the cinematic urge to open things up and include more people and locations. Hunter thought about all of that, but in the end he embraced his original instinct: If Charlie can’t leave his apartment, neither can the audience.

“Every time I thought about going outside his apartment, I was like, ‘I don’t understand what value this is adding,’” Hunter said. “’It’s adding all this air, but I don’t know what this air does for us.’ At a certain point, Darren said, ‘This really is a play on film, and we should embrace that.’”

One big change is that Thomas is no longer “Elder Thomas.” As in, he no longer comes from a Mormon upbringing. He comes from a self-created evangelical church, as did Hunter.

“That decision comes from being a little honest with myself about the fact that I probably made the character Mormon initially as an act of self-protection,” Hunter said. “I attended a fundamentalist high school that was very similar to the church in the movie, so changing it to something much closer to my own experience just felt more honest.”

There has been some expectable criticism for casting Fraser as Charlie because of Hollywood’s long dependence on so-called “fat suits” (two words that never come out of Hunter’s mouth). Casting against type is a lightning rod for controversy in the film and stage worlds right now. Fraser clearly is not a 600-pound man, but the film both allows you and forces you to see what a 600-pound man truly looks like.

Still, as a man who battled food addiction himself, Hunter gets it.

“It’s a tough issue,” he said. “I understand that Hollywood’s history of using costumes to add size to a character is a really awful one. It’s been used to make those characters the butt of the joke, to dehumanize them, to make fun of them. But we would never do that. This play and this movie are a call for empathy.

“What we are doing is the diametric opposite of what has ever been done before. Adrien Morot made the suit for us, and it is a work of art. It’s a beautiful thing that belongs in a museum.”

Beyond the suit, Hunter has been loving the reaction to Fraser’s astonishing performance.

“From the very beginning, when we did a reading of the script in a little theater in the East Village right before the pandemic hit, it was just so clear that what Brendan brings is exactly what the role needs, which is all of that joy and love and hope amidst the sadness,” Hunter said. That’s real life. Joy and despair exist right next to one another, and that is what Brendan shows.”

No matter how far Hunter’s rocket ship takes him away from Denver, he’s bringing his love for the city with him. He proved it again and again as a writer on the FX drama “Baskets,” which featured the late, Emmy-winning Louis Anderson as Christine Baskets, a plus-sized character the New York Times called one of the greatest in TV history. When Christine moves to Denver for love and arrives for the first time, she exuberantly tells her cab driver: “I love Denver!” She and her new man dine at the Buckhorn Exchange “because I have such great memories of spending New Year’s Eve there,” Hunter said.

“I definitely wrote Christine’s love for Denver from a truly honest place.”

When Hunter says he is looking forward to bringing “The Whale” to Denver on Saturday, he’s not kidding. It will be the first time he and his husband are leaving their 5-year-old daughter with grandparents for a trip — ever.

“I am so happy to be going back there,” he said. “It feels like coming home. It really does.”