In a new article for GQ, writer Zach Baron profiles the late 1990s/early aughts superstar Brendan Fraser, who all but disappeared from the public eye over the past decade. It turns out a combination of personal, physical, and professional stress—including experiencing sexual harassment—caused Fraser to step away from the limelight almost entirely. But Fraser’s now making a career comeback as a prestige TV character actor, and this profile is an intimate, poignant look into his journey. Here’s an excerpt:
Movie stardom is a phenomenon even movie stars can’t reliably explain. Some executive or a director puts your face on a screen in a theater, and there’s something about your features or the way your parents raised you or the decade you happened to arrive in Hollywood, some ineffable thing that goes beyond acting that you have no conscious control over, and millions of people respond to it. Fraser was gentle and eager and apparently guileless, and we as a country decided that was something we wanted as frequently as he would provide it, and so he spent some of the best years of his life doing his best to do just that. […]
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.
He laughs a small, sad laugh. “This is gonna really probably be a little saccharine for you,” Fraser warns. “But I felt like the horse from Animal Farm, whose job it was to work and work and work. Orwell wrote a character who was, I think, the proletariat. He worked for the good of the whole, he didn’t ask questions, he didn’t make trouble until it killed him.… I don’t know if I’ve been sent to the glue factory, but I’ve felt like I’ve had to rebuild shit that I’ve built that got knocked down and do it again for the good of everyone. Whether it hurts you or not.”
You can read the full article on GQ.
[Photo: Blast From The Past; 1999 New Line Cinema]