The Unexpected Brendan Fraser

https://lebeauleblog.com/2021/01/27/the-unexpected-brendan-fraser/

The Mummy was an unexpected smash hit that made its leading man, Brendan Fraser, an unlikely movie star. Promoting the movie’s release earned Fraser the cover of the June 1999 issue of Movieline magazine. At the time, Fraser was excited about life as a newlywed. This interview covers a high point in the actor’s life and career.

Brendan Fraser is not your macho strutting type of actor. What comes through upon first meeting him is his sensitivity. He exudes a gentleness, and his soft-spoken voice is calming. He’s a big guy (six-foot-three), but instead of using his stature and strength to play action heroes, he’s made a strange career out of being the lovable doofus in films like Encino Man, Airheads, George of the Jungle, Still Breathing, Blast From the Past and this summer’s Dudley Do-Right. That isn’t what he started out to do–his first major role was in School Ties, where he played the vulnerable Jewish boy in a prep school that counted among its students then-unknowns Chris O’Donnell, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. But the sweet-spirited looniness Fraser showed in Encino Man led to the improbable string of cartoonish portrayals that have overshadowed his work in less successful films like Twilight of the Golds.

One person I spoke to about Fraser commented, “He’s done career-suicide material so many times, yet his films grow in popularity. He’s got some wholesome, transparent quality. You can’t see his personality in the back of his characters.” Fraser’s personal unobtrusiveness on- and offscreen may well be the result of growing up part of a family that moved so often he never became part of any community. His father worked for the Canadian government in Europe and the United States as well as Canada, and Fraser went from one school to another before finally getting his degree at the Actor’s Conservatory at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts.

The last couple of years have marked an unmistakable transition for Brendan Fraser. First, he turned 30. Second, he married his girlfriend of six years, Afton Smith, and settled down to a home life. Third, he surprised anyone who’d dismissed him as a lightweight by playing Clayton Boone, the good-hearted, hunky gardener, opposite Ian McKellen’s over-the-hill Hollywood director James Whale in the award-winning Gods and Monsters. And fourth, he took on his first action-hero role in the big-budget pre-Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace extravaganza The Mummy. Fraser has done lots of movies since he first got to Hollywood, more than most actors his age. Now what may have seemed until recently a lark of a career strategy looks like something a good deal more deliberate and enduring.