Brendan Fraser’s sad career confession
Brendan Fraser was a Hollywood leading man, movie heart throb and action hero through the 90s and noughties – until his body “fell apart.”
Actor Brendan Fraser has opened up in a new interview about the pressure he felt to maintain a movie star physique earlier in his career, confessing he pushed his body to breaking point.
Fraser, 57, started his career in the early 90s with the first of a number of big-screen roles that put his muscular physique on full display: 1991’s Encino Man, which saw him play a caveman transported to modern-day LA. Roles in films like George of the Jungle and The Mummy franchise cemented his status as a ripped action-comedy star.
But in a new discussion with fellow actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for Variety, Fraser said that by the time he was approaching his 40th birthday, his body began to fail him.
“There comes a point where you fall apart. And I guess around 2007 or ’08 or ’09, around there, I was doing a movie in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario — it was a low-budget thing, and we were rolling around in streams and off of mountains, making stuff up as we go along,” he recalled.
Fraser said he was battling pain and injury through the shoot but was “pretending that I wasn’t.”
“The movie ended and I thought, ‘I’m getting too old for this sh*t. It’s starting to catch up with me. If I’m going to continue, I have to have a real reckoning with myself about why I am getting banged around and bruised.’ I had to actually ask myself a serious question that I’d been avoiding: Why am I doing this? I had to take ownership of the reason, and that was [that] I was trying too hard.”
He confessed he’d been approaching his acting career with a mindset he had to lose: “I was feeling like, unless it hurts, then I’m not earning my keep.”
Fraser’s Hollywood career slowed in the noughties as the blockbuster roles dried up and he appeared in a string of box office bombs.
In 2018, he alleged that in 2003, he was sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, then the head of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Berk called Fraser’s “version” of the story “a total fabrication.”
He told GQ that the alleged assault led him to withdraw from the spotlight: “I became depressed,” he told the outlet. “I was blaming myself and I was miserable.”
But Fraser’s gone through a career rebirth in recent years, with roles in films like Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move (2021) and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
It was his starring role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale (2022) which earned him the most praise – including an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Fraser accepted his Oscar with an emotional speech, referencing the challenges he’s faced in his career and his unlikely Hollywood comeback.
“I started in this business 30 years ago, and things didn’t come easily to me but there was a facility that I had that I didn’t appreciate at the time. Until it stopped,” he said.
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Originally published as Brendan Fraser’s sad career confession
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