What Ever Happened To Brendan Fraser?
I thought this was an interesting interview with Fraser who has sort of become an enigma in recent years. Loads more at the link but I've highlighted some deeper parts.
His eyes are pale and a bit watery these days—less wide than they used to be when he was new to the screen, playing guys who were often new to the world. Blue-gray stubble around the once mighty chin, gray long-sleeve shirt draped indifferently over the once mighty body. I'm 35: There was a time when the sight of Fraser was as familiar to me as the furniture in my parents' house. He was in Encino Man and School Ties in 1992, Airheads in 1994, George of the Jungle in 1997, The Mummy in 1999. If you watched movies at the end of the previous century, you watched Brendan Fraser. And though his run as a leading man in studio films lasted to the end of this past decade, he's been missing, or at least somewhere off in the margins, for some time now. He was there on the poster, year after year, and then he wasn't, and it took him turning up in a supporting part in the third season of a premium-cable show, The Affair, for many of us to even realize that he'd been gone.
And so these synthetic flutes end up being the soundtrack to Fraser's story. He starts, uncharacteristically, at the beginning. Fraser's first acting job was in a 1991 film called Dogfight, starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. He played Sailor #1. "They gave me a sailor outfit, along with some other guys, and we did a punch-up scene with some Marines. And I got my Screen Actors Guild card and an extra 50 bucks for the stunt adjustment, 'cause they threw me into a pinball machine. I think I bruised a rib, but I was like: That's okay! I'll take it. I can do it again. If you want, I'll break it. You want me to do it again?"
Well, yes. This would become an on-screen signature of Fraser's: crashing into things. He was big and handsome in a broad, unthreatening way, and most important, he was game. In Encino Man, the film that helped turn him into a star, Fraser played a caveman recently freed from a block of ice in modern-day California; he likes to joke, or simply recount, that his audition consisted of wordlessly wrestling a plant. He had the unique quality of a man beholding the world for the first time, and directors began casting him as exactly that. For much of the 1990s, Fraser spent a lot of time emerging wide-eyed from bomb shelters (Blast from the Past) or Canada (Dudley Do-Right) or the rain forest (George of the Jungle), but he also took on more serious roles. In 1992, he starred with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O'Donnell in the drama School Ties, as a Jewish scholarship quarterback fighting for his place at an elite, anti-Semitic boarding school. (This was a natural part, minus the religious dynamics, for Fraser, who grew up in a happy but peripatetic family—his father had a job in Canada's office of tourism—and enrolled in a new school practically every other year.)
He remade Bedazzled, with Elizabeth Hurley, in 2000. Did MonkeyBone and a Mummysequel, The Mummy Returns, in 2001. Looney Toons: Back in Action, 2003. And on it went—in retrospect, far beyond where Fraser wanted it to go. "I believe I probably was trying too hard, in a way that's destructive," Fraser says now. The films, in addition to having diminishing returns, were causing a physical toll: He was a big man doing stunts, running around in front of green screens, going from set to set. His body began to fall apart. "By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China," which was 2008, "I was put together with tape and ice—just, like, really nerdy and fetishy about ice packs. Screw-cap ice packs and downhill-mountain-biking pads, 'cause they're small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily." Eventually all these injuries required multiple surgeries: "I needed a laminectomy. And the lumbar didn't take, so they had to do it again a year later." There was a partial knee replacement. Some more work on his back, bolting various compressed spinal pads together. At one point he needed to have his vocal cords repaired. All told, Fraser says, he was in and out of hospitals for almost seven years.
When his episodes of The Affair began airing, in late 2016, Fraser was asked to give his first interview in years, for AOL's YouTube channel. It is an uncomfortable watch. Fraser seems morose and sad; for much of it, he speaks in a near whisper. The video went viral. In the months that followed, theories sprang up about what ailed him, focusing on his 2009 divorce and the fact that two franchises he'd once starred in, The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, had been rebooted and recast without him.
As it turns out, what was behind the sad Brendan Fraser meme was…sadness. His mother had died of cancer just days before the interview. "I buried my mom," Fraser says. "I think I was in mourning, and I didn't know what that meant." He hadn't done press in a while; suddenly he was sitting on a stool in front of an audience, promoting the third season of a show he'd barely been on. "I wasn't quite sure what the format was. And I felt like: Man, I got fucking old. Damn, this is the way it's done now?"
