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BRENDAN
FRASER is big man in Hollywood. The six-foot-three actor
has a firm handshake and a marquee smile, but when he
talks, he’s so soft-spoken—and aware of that fact—that
he’s constantly leaning in and stooping over during
conversations. But he’s aware of the lean, as well; he
acknowledges that he routinely makes himself smaller to
fit in.
 “I’ve
always had a bit of a complex about being over 6' 2",”
he confesses. “I’ve developed bad posture; I always try
to become diminutive and stoop so as not to feel I’m
dominating.”
This
from a bona-fide action star with well more than a
billion dollars in worldwide box-office grosses and two
high-profile movies out in less than a month—Journey
to the Center of the Earth and The Mummy: Tomb of
the Dragon Emperor.
It’s
that larger-than-life image that Fraser says follows him
around the globe. People in seemingly every country he
visits ask him when the next Mummy film—in which he
plays intrepid adventurer Rick O’Connell—is coming out.
They rarely ask him about working with Ian McKellen on
the critically acclaimed indie movie Gods and
Monsters, or Graham Greene’s prescience in writing
The Quiet American.
“I
suppose everyone wants to enjoy themselves,” says Fraser
over a bowl of corn chowder at a Santa Monica
restaurant. The actor is clearly proudest of those
smaller films he’s appeared in, including 2005 Oscar
Best Picture winner Crash, but is cheerfully
unapologetic about his higher-grossing, less-cerebral
work in the likes of George of the Jungle.
“Larger-budget fare... heck, I go to the movies to have
a good time,” he says. “I want to be taken somewhere
else. I want to be shown something new. I want to have
the opportunity to laugh out loud. Put whatever’s on
your mind aside for a while. And I’m grateful every time
I have a chance to make a film.”
He’s not
kidding. Fraser still feels the bruises from stumbles
like 2001’s Monkeybone. He’s also honest about a
period of time after the second Mummy movie in which he
says he “couldn’t get arrested.”
“Then,
when you least expect it and stop working so hard, stop
caring how you’re perceived by others in the industry,
you start enjoying yourself again and the job gets a lot
easier,” he says.
In his
popcorn movies, Fraser exudes a masculine and earnest
accessibility, a throwback charm that hearkens to an
earlier Hollywood era and brings to mind names like
Flynn and Gable. So while he’s discovering a hidden
world in the Earth’s core or brawling with the undead,
fans cheer rather than cringe. Journey director Eric
Brevig says, “I needed a guy who could go from being a
sad sack to the Man of Steel in 90 minutes and make you
love him the whole time, and Brendan does it better than
anyone else.”
Trying
to fit in
AS the
39-year-old father of three boys talks about personality
traits that aided his success, a pattern emerges. He
says his family moved around a lot (Indianapolis,
Toronto, Seattle), often leaving him scrambling to
belong, needing friends and sometimes resorting to
imaginary ones. And it’s a motif reflected in many of
his early roles. He describes Encino Man as the
story of a caveman who has been in a time capsule and is
trying to fit in, a theme repeated (sans Neanderthal) by
the struggling outsiders in School Ties (“The
movie is about belonging and not belonging,” he says)
and Blast From the Past (in which he plays
another man out of time trying to find his place in a
strange world).
Brevig,
an Oscar recipient for his special-effects work on
Total Recall, said by phone that Fraser’s surprising
vulnerability and self-knowledge are strengths: “He is
aware of what audiences want to see of him. He
understands his image and that his fans have
preferences. He tries to give them what they like. He
knew this wasn’t a maudlin film, an art movie.”
But
Brevig got more than a leading man for Journey with
Fraser.
“I was
surprised that he was so smart that he was aware of how
to fix some of the shortcomings of the script,” he said,
crediting the actor with the key suggestion to switch
the main characters’ relationship from a father and son
in the screenplay back to the uncle-nephew identities
they had in the Jules Verne novel, among other ideas. “I
had been meeting with development executives for months
and no one said this.”
“So they
made me an exec,” says Fraser, proud of earning the
executive-producer stripe, “which I asked for, because I
wanted to have a voice at the table. Because on
School Ties [1992], one of the producers referred to
actors as ‘talking props.’ That told me a lot.”
Fraser
says that although Journey is an action-fantasy
movie shot in 3D, budget restrictions forced Brevig to
return to “student filmmaking techniques.”
“They
wouldn’t build us a waterfall to slide down” for an
important stunt, Fraser says. “So Eric said, ‘We’re
gonna build a runway, cover it with a slick surface, and
get fire hoses from the fire department.’ Then there was
like a pickup truck [pulling us along].”
He
laughs, then adds, “We were all asking for extra takes
because it was so much fun.”
True to
his ability to straddle the line between indie and more
commercial fare, he then offers this take on the
characters’ actual plunge to Earth’s core: “They fall
down this volcanic tube, almost like Lewis Carroll,
backward through the rabbit hole, splash! A quasibaptism
takes place and they’re reborn. They become better
versions of themselves.”
Fraser
says Brevig wooed him with cutting-edge 3D footage at
James Cameron’s Lightstorm facility.
The
actual filming necessitated a great deal of playing to
nonexistent monsters and environments, which Brevig said
was one reason he wanted to hire the actor.
Noting
that Fraser had fended off cartoon characters added in
postproduction, Brevig says, “I knew he was brilliant at
being able to pantomime fighting against creatures that
weren’t there.”
When
asked if he ever felt silly pretending to be menaced by
imaginary dinosaurs, Fraser laughs and says, “Never.
That’s my job, my friend. If you want respect, go be a
doctor.” |
