Brendan Fraser, 57, Has Nothing Left to Prove

Fraser’s first non-storage-unit, big-screen job was in the 1991 film Dogfight, starring River Phoenix, the wildly talented young actor who died of a drug overdose in 1993. Then 22, Fraser played Sailor No. 1. It wasn’t much of a role, but it earned him his Screen Actors Guild card. The very next year, Fraser, who is not Jewish, would end up starring in School Ties as a Jewish scholarship athlete (football, of course!) fighting for his place at a Waspy boarding school that’s rampant with antisemitism. It’s a good movie, and Fraser starred alongside up-and-comers like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris O’Donnell. Fraser didn’t have much experience on movie sets yet, but he could tell he was involved in something special. “We were all hungry,” he says. “It felt like this was all of our big shot.” Fraser recalls playing basketball in Damon’s driveway — and then being filled with pride five years later when Damon and Affleck stood on stage at the Academy Awards, clutching their Oscars for Good Will Hunting.

Although Damon and Affleck would win their Oscars sooner, it was Fraser who made his mark first on the big screen, getting cast in fizzy lightweight comedies like ​Encino Man (frozen caveman is thawed out in the MTV era), Airheads (dim rock band takes a radio station hostage) and George of the Jungle, which, in typical dad-joke fashion, he describes as the movie that tons of parents played on the VCR to keep their kids occupied. (“I was the babysitter tape when Mommy and Daddy wanted some alone time,” he quips.) It’s fair to say that while Fraser wasn’t always a critics’ favorite during that early chapter, he gave glittering performances that garnered their attention and respect, such as his star turn with Ian McKellen in the acclaimed drama Gods and Monsters.

And then, a year later, he became one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, when he was cast as a can-do adventurer in 1999’s The Mummy, a summer tentpole that would spawn the most lucrative role of his career, earning $417 million in theaters that year and launching a franchise.

By that point, Fraser was married to Afton Smith, and three sons came along quickly thereafter. Despite all the outward success he was having in Hollywood, in private Fraser began experiencing something that still torments him: depression. Acting, of course, is a profession that comes with an unavoidable degree of job insecurity. You can never be sure when your next job is coming, nor how your work will be judged. Yes, the success of The Mummy allowed him to breathe. But his depression returned with a vengeance following a 2003 incident involving a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. At an event, Fraser alleged, the man groped his rear end. The executive initially denied the allegation but later wrote that he had pinched Fraser “in jest.” The incident sent Fraser spiraling into a dark place.

“In this job, you live in a constant state of panic, and you can’t get too comfortable,” Fraser says. “I’ve learned to check in with myself and constantly reevaluate what’s important. And you also need to ask for help when you need it. Early on, I didn’t know you could ask for help. I only saw the stigma of it. I was afraid to say, ‘I need a hand.’ ”

When he’s asked if needing a hand means therapy, he says, “Absolutely! Reaching out to friends, getting the exercise you need, even having a bit of breakfast, like we’re doing right now. They’re small things, but when you’re dealing with those feelings, they can make a monumental difference.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given how some stars look down on meet-and-greet fan conventions, Fraser says these interactions have had a huge, positive impact on his mental health. “People will come up to me and show me tattoos of characters from The Mummy or tell me that they became an archaeologist because of my character. That’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

The Mummy would keep Fraser busy and comfortably employed for the next decade. But what the movie gods give, they can just as easily take away. By the third installment, 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Fraser had badly injured his back doing stunts. A series of surgeries followed. Suddenly, he was an above-the-title blockbuster hero whose spine was held together by nuts and bolts, facing physical challenges on set — and at home.

Jeanne Moore and Brendan Fraser attend AARP The Magazine’s 21st Annual Movies For Grownups Awards at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on Jan. 28, 2023, in Beverly Hills, California.

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Fraser’s oldest son, Griffin, is 23. With no small amount of pride, Fraser calls him an “ASD kid” (referring to autism spectrum disorder). Griffin is 6 foot 5 and has a habit of greeting his dad with vise-tight bear hugs. When he does, Fraser winces through the agony because, well, the pain is worth it.

Listening to Fraser talk about his three sons (Holden is 21, Leland is 19), it’s obvious he considers being a good dad his greatest accomplishment. He’s been divorced from the boys’ mother, Smith, since 2007 and is in a committed relationship with makeup artist Jeanne Moore, with whom he is often seen walking hand in hand on red carpets. You get the sense that if everything went away tomorrow — the fame, the first-class travel, the seven-figure paychecks — he’d be fine with it as long as his sons were happy and thriving. When he’s asked for a bit of advice he might offer parents, Fraser breaks into a wide grin. “Don’t get in the way.”

That’s it?

“That’s it. Sure, children need guidance, but you can micro­manage them to their detriment. I never learned as much about anything as I have from just watching and listening and letting them teach me rather than the other way around.”

(From left) Leland Fraser, Brendan Fraser and Holden Fraser attend “The Whale” premiere at Alice Tully Hall in New York, NY, on Nov. 29, 2022.

Photo by Efren Landaos/Sipa USA)

Knowing that all actors’ careers ebb and flow doesn’t make it any less difficult when the inevitable ebb comes. And in the 2010s, Fraser’s career was in the doldrums. He never stopped working — he racked up 17 film and television credits from 2010 to 2019 — but the movies he appeared in were smaller, less star-studded and often just overlooked. He knew he wasn’t connecting with audiences the way he once had, and it gnawed at him. Already prone to depression, Fraser found this dark period particularly challenging. “The silences in a career can be deafening,” he says.

Throughout Fraser’s decade-long exile from the A-list, he continued to do what he’s always done, even when he was riding high: He put his head down and worked. But Fraser’s slump in the 2010s would end up making what happened next that much sweeter.

During the COVID pandemic, Fraser got word that he’d won the lead role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. The celebrated director of The Wrestler and Black Swan was itching to shoot Samuel Hunter’s 2012 stage play about a 600-pound shut-in named Charlie who’s trying to reconnect with his daughter before his weight literally crushes him to death. It was an intense and emotionally devastating script, and Fraser knew it would be an especially tricky role to pull off, both physically and emotionally. He also knew it came with the kind of responsibility he hadn’t had in years. The film would either succeed or tank based solely on his performance.

One of the strangest rumors to arise while Fraser was shooting The Whale was that he had somehow managed to pack on 300-plus pounds for the part. When I mention this, he can’t help but crack up. “Like everyone else who was sequestered at home during COVID, I put on a few pounds,” he says. “But that was helpful to Darren. When I met with him, he tactfully said, ‘Can you keep those pounds on? Can you just sort of maintain where you are now?’ ”

It turns out that the extra 15 or 20 pounds he was carrying actually helped with applying the massive prosthetics to his body. Fraser pulls out his phone and shows me time-lapse videos of being turned into Charlie. “This was before they came up with the COVID vaccine, so in the back of my head I’m thinking, This may be the last time we get to do this job. That gave me the fuel to leave everything on the field.”

Fraser poses after winning the Best Actor in a Leading Role award for “The Whale” at the 95th Annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood.

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As soon as critics and industry types began attending advance screenings of The Whale, Fraser found himself in a position he’d never been in: His name was being batted around in the same breath as the word “Oscar.” And since Hollywood loves an underdog story, all of a sudden he began to notice that his career — the good, the bad and the forgettable — had become part of a larger, Lazarus-like comeback narrative. The same industry that, until recently, had been indifferent to him had taken him under its wing and was cheering him on.

Fraser admits it felt amazing, even if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with people using the word “comeback” or the more coy “Brenaissance.”

“I understood why people were framing it as a comeback, but the truth is, I never went that far away,” he says.

When he won best actor at the 2023 Academy Awards for The Whale, Fraser says, laughing, “I don’t remember what I said at all! I can feel the atmosphere if I really think about it, but that’s it.” Regardless, that night Fraser’s comeback story was finally complete. The man who had started off as a storage-facility sales mascot had won the biggest accolade Hollywood offers. “Before The Whale, I had everything to prove,” he says. “And now, to be honest, not so much.” Fraser felt like he could move on. But move on to what? “That was sort of the big question,” Fraser says. “When I finished The Whale, I thought, I’ve got no more moves.”

Winning the Oscar allowed Fraser to focus less on where he stood in the Hollywood pecking order and more on his characters and role selections.

Photographed by Peter Yang. Produced by Michael Klein/Circadian Pictures; wardrobe stylist direction: Sam Spector; on-set stylist: Brooke Llewellyn; groomer: Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Alba1913

There was one director, though, who thought Fraser’s next role should turn his new reality on its head: He should play a washed-up small-time actor. Hikari, the Japanese director of Fraser’s new film, Rental Family, remembers attending a special screening of The Whale before the 2023 Oscars. When the film was over, Fraser was beamed in via Zoom for a post-screening Q&A. Seeing his face projected onto the screen, bigger than life, she knew she’d found the star of her new movie. “When I saw him speak and witnessed how kind and generous and compassionate he was, I said, ‘That’s my guy!’ ”

The feeling turned out to be mutual. Winning the Oscar allowed Fraser to focus less on where he stood in the Hollywood pecking order and more on his characters and role selections. And you can see that sense of freedom in Rental Family. Fraser calls the movie “a love letter to loneliness.” He’s not wrong. But the movie is also a lot more fun than that sounds. Fraser speaks Japanese in the film and taps into previously untapped reservoirs of feeling and hurt and vulnerability. It’s a hell of a post-Oscars encore. And with the recent headline that he’s planning on starring in a brand-new, big-budget Mummy sequel (the first since 2008), his hot streak isn’t likely to end anytime soon. “I have no regrets,” he sums up as breakfast winds down. “There’s no reason to take my foot off the gas.”

And with that, Brendan Fraser gets up and, like any great showman spying a new audience, again prepares to workshop his tablecloth magic act, this time for a nearby couple who have pulled out their phones to capture the bit on video. He even takes the gag a bit further, stopping just short of sending his half-finished breakfast flying. The couple laughs. Fraser grins and laughs right along with them, then walks out into the bright sunshine of a new day.