We Finally Know What Really Happened To Brendan Fraser

 

 

 

There is a moment from March 12th, 2023 that anyone who watched it will not easily forget. Brendan Fraser walks onto the stage of the Dolby Theater to accept the Oscar for best actor. His eyes are red. His voice barely holds. He looks at the statue and says, “So this is what the multiverse looks like.

” The standing ovation had started before he reached the microphone. He was not describing a career slump. He was describing something that had been done to him. And the [clears throat] world, which had spent 20 years making memes out of his sadness and wondering whatever happened to that guy from The Mummy, finally began to understand what it had been watching all along.

 Brendan James Fraser was born on December 3rd, 1968 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The youngest of three boys in a family that moved constantly. His father was a travel executive. By the time Brendan was in his teens, he had lived in Detroit, Seattle, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and London. He attended the Fraser Academy in Vancouver, a school for students with learning disabilities, and then Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and finally Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he trained seriously and developed the instincts that would

eventually make people stop everything they were doing to watch him. He grew up always being the new kid. He has talked about it many times in many different ways, but the version that gets closest to the truth is this. When you are always the new guy, you develop the survival tactic of fitting in immediately.

 You become whatever the room needs. You find the comedy in the discomfort. You make people like you before they have time to decide they don’t. That instinct for warmth, for self-deprecation, for making the most absurd situation feel natural was exactly what his early career required. Encino Man in 1992 put him in front of a mass audience for the first time, playing a defrosted caveman navigating high school with the specific combination of bewilderment and earnest goodwill that became his signature.

 He was genuinely funny in it, not in the way that relies on the joke landing, but in the way that relies on the person being real enough that the joke is almost beside the point. Wide-eyed, wanting to please, certain that everything was going to be all right. That same year, he appeared in School Ties, a dramatically different film, a serious drama about a Jewish teenager trying to survive at an anti-Semitic prep school in the 1950s.

Matt Damon was in it. Ben Affleck was in it. Chris O’Donnell was in it. Fraser played David Green, the outsider who was good enough but not accepted for what he fundamentally was. He has talked about how he got the role partly because of his screen test with Damon because Damon was such a good actor that he made Fraser better just by being across from him, and he knew that if he simply listened to what Matt was saying, he could convey everything the scene required without forcing it.

 He was nominated by the Chicago Film Critics Association as the most promising actor of 1993. Nobody argued with that assessment. What followed was the kind of decade that actors dream about and strategists plan for. George of the Jungle in 1997, Gods and Monsters in 1998, the Oscar-winning film in which he played opposite Ian McKellen with the restraint and sensitivity that nobody who had only seen him in comedies could have predicted.

 And then The Mummy in 1999, the film that transformed him from a beloved cult figure into a global superstar. Rick O’Connell, treasure hunter, adventurer, born lucky fool, and the man who runs toward danger with a grin and somehow keeps getting away with it. The film cost $80 million and made nearly half a billion.

 Fraser was on top. He had also nearly died making it. During the execution scene at the start of the film, a scene that required a mock hanging, the director wanted a tighter rope for a close-up. Fraser told him he was not sure about it. The director said, “Just one more take.” He did it. The camera caught his face.

 Then there was a sound like volume going wrong, and then nothing. And then his elbow was in his ear, and there were medics saying, “Hello, Brendan. Wake up.” His doctor later told him he had been technically dead for 12 to 14 seconds. He told the David Letterman story about the sandstorms in the Sahara and made it funny. He did not mention the 12 seconds.

 That was the Brendan Fraser of those years. A man who did things that were genuinely dangerous and turned them into self-deprecating material for late-night television. A man who described his acting preparation for a demanding desert shoot by saying, “Years and months. Months. Weeks. And then there was the bicycle pump before each take.

 They call it cotton. That’s a trade secret.” A man who showed up and did the work and made it look easy and never mentioned the cost. >> The cost, in the case of The Mummy and its sequels, was significant. He did the stunts. He rode his own camels. He ran in the desert heat. He fought. He fell. He was held together, as he later described it, with tape and ice.

 An exoskeleton he built for himself daily. Padding from mountain bike knee guards fitted under his costume because they were light and small and could be concealed. He had a spinal laminectomy. The lumbar didn’t take, so they had to do it again a year later. A partial knee replacement. More work on the back.

 At one point, his vocal cords required surgery. He was in and out of hospitals for nearly seven years. His body paying the price for a decade of telling the camera that everything was fine. And then, in 2003, something happened that had nothing to do with his body. He was at a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

 He was riding high. The Mummy Returns had been as profitable as the original, and he was one of the industry’s most bankable names. He left the event and encountered Philip Berk, who was then the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that ran the Golden Globes. They shook hands. What happened next, Fraser described years later to GQ in terms that were specific and devastating.

 Berk’s left hand reached around, grabbed his behind, and a finger moved in a way that was not accidental. “I felt ill,” Fraser said. “I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry. I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me.” He did not go to the police.

 He told his wife, Afton Smith, who he had married in 1998, and with whom he had three sons, he thought about telling the cops. He decided against it. He was afraid of what it would cost him, not in money, but in identity, in narrative, in becoming a story that he had no control over. “I didn’t want to contend with how that made me feel, or become part of my narrative,” he said.

 He asked his representatives to contact the HFPA and request that Berk write an apology. What came back was a non-apology of the specific variety that everyone in a position of institutional power knows how to generate. “If I’ve done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended, and I apologize.” No admission, no accountability.

 The HFPA also promised, through intermediaries, that Fraser would never have to be in the same room with Burke again. Burke denied making this promise. The HFPA declined to comment on it. What happened next is not verifiable in the way that a contract termination or a studio memo is verifiable.

 It is verifiable only in the way that a sudden absence is verifiable, in the negative space where a career had been. The Golden Globe nominations that stopped coming, the invitations that dried up, the roles that went to other people, the silence. “I don’t know if this incurred disfavor with the HFPA,” Fraser told GQ in 2018, “but the silence was deafening.

 That’s the thing about being blacklisted. Nobody says you’re blacklisted. They just quietly ignore you and stop calling.” He became depressed. He has said so plainly, without softening it. “I was blaming myself,” he said. “I was miserable because I was saying, ‘This is nothing. This guy reached around and copped a feel.

‘ And that summer wore on, and I can’t remember what I went on to work on next.” He had trouble with his memory. He lost his sense of self. Something had been taken away from him, and he could feel the shape of it even when he couldn’t find the words to describe it to anyone, including himself. He kept working, not at the level he had been working, but he showed up.

 He had a role in the Oscar-winning ensemble drama Crash in 2004. He appeared in Scrubs and in The Simpsons in smaller and smaller parts. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in 2008 was not the hit the previous two had been. Journey to the Center of the Earth was a surprise success, but the studio replaced him with Dwayne Johnson for the sequel rather than wait for the original director. He was not consulted.

 He was told after the fact. His personal life fell apart in parallel. He and Afton divorced in 2009, and the settlement required him to pay $50,000 per month in spousal support plus 25,000 in child support for their three sons, determined at the height of his earning power in a career that was no longer at that height.

 His mother, Carol Mary Fraser, died in 2016. He was close to her in the way that people are close to the one parent who became the anchor after everything else was uncertain. A few [clears throat] days after her death, he gave an interview for a television show he had a role on, Showtime’s The Affair, a supporting part in a critically acclaimed series, and he showed up to promote it because that was what you did.

 He sat across from the interviewer with sloped shoulders and a vacant stare and a voice that kept catching on things, and he tried to find the words for his excitement about a television drama while being a few days removed from burying his mother. He failed. Not in the professional sense, he completed the interview, but in the human sense, the sense that was completely visible to anyone watching.

 The internet did not know any of this context. It saw a man who used to be famous looking tired and diminished and sad and it made a meme out of his face, sad Brendan Fraser. The clip spread across every platform that existed in 2016. People felt clever sharing it. It was easy to forget watching it that the man in the clip was a person and not a symbol of Hollywood has-beanness.

He did not respond publicly to any of it. Not the memes, not the questions about his career, not the increasingly visible campaign by his fans, a change.org petition to help revive his career, a collection of tributes from people who had grown up watching The Mummy and could not understand where he had gone.

 He was raising three boys, one of whom is on the autism spectrum, quietly and away from the cameras that had made him famous. He was also managing a level of physical, financial, and emotional distress that would have broken many people and that he managed largely by going very still. Then 2018 arrived and everything in Hollywood that had been operating in the dark began to come into the light.

 The allegations against Harvey Weinstein had broken open in 2017 and the reckoning that followed was reshaping the industry’s relationship with the people it had protected and the people it had silenced. Brendan Fraser had watched women he knew, people he called friends in his mind, even ones he hadn’t spoken to in years, find the courage to describe what had been done to them.

 “I watched these wonderful people,” he said, “with the courage to say what I didn’t have the courage to say. He told his story to GQ, everything he had kept private for 15 years. What happened in the Beverly Hills Hotel, what he felt leaving that room was, what the silence had cost him in the years that followed.

 He was careful not to make direct causal claims. He said he didn’t know if the HFPA’s treatment of him was directly connected to what had happened with Burke, but the timeline was visible to anyone who looked at it. The career that had been ascending, then the event, then the silence. The world responded differently than it might have 10 years earlier.

 The HFPA began to fracture. Philip Berk was eventually expelled from the organization in 2021 after making racially insensitive comments about one of the nominated films. The HFPA was dissolved in 2023, its power structure dismantled, and the Golden Globes sold to a new ownership group that had no connection to the people who had run the old one into the ground.

 Fraser declined the invitation to attend the Golden Globes throughout his comeback year, and won the award at the SAG ceremony instead, surrounded by his peers, not by the people who had made him invisible. The comeback itself began quietly and gathered momentum the way real things do, not through a campaign or a calculated strategy, but through a director named Darren Aronofsky, who was working on an adaptation of a play called The Whale.

The play was about a man named Charlie, a severely obese English teacher, reclusive, estranged from his daughter, spending his final days trying to make something right. Aronofsky had been trying to cast the role for 10 years. He had considered, by his own account, essentially everyone on the planet. Then he thought of Brendan Fraser.

 Fraser went to the meeting knowing only that it was a play that Aronofsky was involved and that he wanted to be in a room with a world-class filmmaker. He has described what happened when he read the script as getting that feeling again, the one he’d had as a kid when the phone rang and the voice on the other end was telling him he had the role.

 The answer is, “Yes,” he thought. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to or if I’m invited to, but the answer is yes.” It felt like destiny calling. To play Charlie, he wore a prosthetic suit that added enormous weight and required hours of preparation each day. He could not move the way he was used to moving.

 He had to find the character from stillness, from the face, from what the eyes were doing in a body that the audience could see was failing. He has said that Charlie was not a difficult character to understand, that Charlie is us. Charlie’s just another person, someone we could easily dismiss but shouldn’t, a human being whose journey happens behind closed doors in the dark, and who deserves to be seen anyway.

 The Whale premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022. The audience gave it a 6-minute standing ovation. Brendan Fraser stood on that stage in Venice and cried. And the 6 minutes felt like the room was paying a debt, not just applauding a film, but acknowledging something that had gone wrong and been quietly born for a very long time.

 This time, nobody made a meme about it. The context was impossible to miss. He went on to win the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Critics’ Choice Award, the Satellite Award. He did not win the Golden Globe, Austin Butler won that, or the BAFTA, but he did not attend the Golden Globes, and that absence was its own kind of statement about what the award had been and what it was no longer allowed to be.

 On March 12th, 2023, at the 95th Academy Awards, Halle Berry and Jessica Chastain announced his name. He walked to the stage. He said, “So, this is what the multiverse looks like.” He thanked A24. He thanked Darren Aronofsky for throwing him a creative lifeline and hauling him aboard. He said, “I started in this business 30 years ago, and things didn’t come easily to me.

 But there was a facility that I didn’t appreciate at the time until it stopped.” He said, “It’s been like a diving expedition on the bottom of the ocean, and the air on the line to the surface is on a launch, being watched over by some people in my life.” He said the names of his sons. He cried. The room gave him another standing ovation.

“Careers go up and down on a valley and peak trajectory,” he told Entertainment Weekly afterward. “But I believe it’s always in the ascendancy. I’ve never been that far away is the short answer. Was I away, or was everyone away from me? I’ll give you the answer. It doesn’t matter. It matters that he came back.

 It matters that he told the truth, and that the industry this time did not punish him for it. It matters that a man who nearly died during a mock hanging in the Moroccan desert, who survived surgeries on his spine and his knee and his vocal cords, who lost his marriage and his mother and spent years being the subject of jokes he had no way to contextualize for the people making them, found his way to a stage in Hollywood with the statue in his hand and said something true about what it costs to keep going when everything stops. He had been

George of the Jungle. He had been Rick O’Connell. He had been the man in the exoskeleton built from tape and ice and mountain bike pads and quiet stubbornness. And then he was Charlie, the man in the apartment, the one we could easily dismiss, the one who deserved to be seen, and we finally, all of us, saw him.