Brendan Fraser: Heartbreak and Keeping Sane in Hollywood
According to the star of Encino Man, The Mummy movies and the upcoming Extraordinary Measures, his 25-year movie career is downright hilarious. Fraser talks to Sharp about the lighter sides of Hollywood, marriage and getting to know Harrison Ford.
By Jeremy Freed
He sits on a windowsill, staring out over the park, and the Manhattan skyline beyond. It’s early on a grey November morning and Brendan Fraser is feeling philosophical in his hotel room. He’s just finished describing a kids’ movie he made over the summer called Furry Vengeance, about a developer battling some cuddly forest creatures in a bid to take over their habitat. His arch-enemy is a raccoon and Brooke Shields plays his wife. It sounds like it might be pretty funny, actually. Before this, he was talking about his next pic- ture, called Extraordinary Measures, a medical drama about a guy fighting to save his kids’ lives, in which he stars opposite Harrison Ford. Nothing funny about that.
And now Fraser’s laughing, this weird kind of high-pitched giggle that seems to come out of nowhere. He’s describing the animal comedy, which might explain it, but it seems as though even he’s caught by surprise. “Why am I laughing?” he asks no one in particular, still laughing. Then, with a sigh that says, ‘Oh. Right. That’s why. And isn’t it all so bizarre?’ he says, “I have a funny career.”Then he’s quiet for a while.
Funny would be one word to describe Fraser’s 25-plus years in Hollywood. In a place that prides itself on categorizing people according to ‘looks’ and ‘types,’ Fraser has built his career on playing an exceptional variety of characters. For instance, in 1992, he co-starred with Pauly Shore in Encino Man, where he played an unfrozen caveman run amok in the San Fernando Valley. That same year he starred in School Ties, a period drama about anti-semitism at a WASPy 1950s boarding school, opposite Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Both movies were good (albeit in very different ways), and that year marked the beginning of Fraser’s career as a leading man.
In the following years he would repeat this strategy numerous times, making weird comedies (1997’s George of the Jungle, in which Fraser wore a loincloth and swung from vines, being perhaps the most memorable example) interspersed with solid, critically acclaimed dramas. Opposite Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters, for which McKellen was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, and opposite Michael Caine in The Quiet American, for which Caine was nominated for Best Actor, Fraser more than held his own. In the lingo of actors, the guy has chops.
Getting to the bottom of why Fraser can make a movie about a vine- swinging jungle simpleton and then star in an Oscar-nominated Graham Greene adaptation has something to do with his personality. He laughs a lot, and seems amused by the world in general. He finds a lot of things funny, his career included. “If you don’t laugh at yourself,” he says, “someone will do it for you, right?”
Brendan Fraser grew up the son of a Canadian foreign service officer, and spent his childhood moving around throughout Canada, the US and Europe, which goes a long way to explain his open-minded view of the world. He spent a big chunk of his teenage years at boarding school at Upper Canada Col- lege in Toronto, and has fond memories of the experience. “I remember Toronto being a wonderful place to be a teenager,” he says, telling a story about skipping out on studying for exams to go stand in line to see Return of the Jedi. “It was a place that made me feel good. I’ve been back for film festivals, and it’s nice to see that the temperament of the place has stayed much the same.”
It was after watching a performance of Oliver! in London’s West End that he decided he wanted to be an actor, and when he graduated from high school he went on to earn a BFA in acting from Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. He credits this with both giving him a solid foundation in performance and teaching him a very important lesson about the nature of the job of acting. “I earned a degree, and then I probably promptly forgot everything I learned,” he says now. “But if I did walk away from it knowing something, that was that it’s just work, and that it’s about burning calories, and at the end of the day, it’s just acting. We’re not curing cancer, or conducting brain surgery or anything like that. This is a work of fiction, a work of art, an entertainment. Yes, it can move, inspire, enlighten, but after it’s all said and done, it’s a job.”
For Fraser, part of that job is staying in shape and gaining and losing weight as his roles require, something that he finds gets more difficult as you age. “For some reason or other I was gifted with a forgiving metabolism, or at least I used to be,” he says. “So, if I wanted to tell my body, ‘OK, it’s time for you to drop 15 pounds,’ as long as you just stay strict with yourself, work out at least three times a week, and watch what you eat, then I could do it. But the thing was that the years that I was doing it, while you’re putting pretty muscles all over your body, I wasn’t taking into consideration that there may be other issues at play also, namely your joints. And they’re going to catch up with you.” Now, Fraser, who’ll be 41 in December, has taken on a more midlife-friendly workout regimen. “I guess at my so- called ‘fittest’ I was pretty goonish,” he says. “I could benchpress a plate over my body weight, but it’s not that important after a while. I’ve come to the realization that it’s more important to be able to reach down and pick up your kid without going, ‘Ahh, my back hurts.’ I’ve re-prioritized, I guess you could say, the way that I approach physical fitness.”
His fitness routine isn’t the only thing he’s re-prioritized in the last few years. Fraser has three children with actress Afton Smith, now seven, five and three, and he has shifted his work schedule to spend as much time with them as possible. “It’s certainly made me make different choices in films that I’ve made,” Fraser says of fatherhood. “I think in the end it’s down to me to budget my time during the year. Maybe I’ll make two pictures now, whereas before I’d just flip-flop back to back. I would like to work closer to home, but now that they’re the age that they are, it’s a bit easier to just pick ’em up and take them with for a visit every now and then when you’re at work, which is nice.”
Fraser and Smith divorced in 2007 after nine years of marriage, and while he doesn’t normally discuss it in interviews, he offers a few words of advice to other men going through similar situations. “It will be a difficult process,” he says, “but if it’s for the best, and you have children, you always have to remind yourself to keep them in the forefront every step of the way. Because they’re the ones that matter the most.” Beyond that, he says, it’s a matter of keeping your eyes on what’s important. “During the process of separation and divorce there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s difficult for everyone. Everyone. But you’ll come out the other side and you’ll be alright. I was told that in the times that were most challenging, and it was true. You emerge a better version of yourself. And you get on with your life. Own it, live with it, stay connected, but also move on.”
While Fraser had worked with plenty of big-name actors over the years, the chance to act with Harrison Ford in Extraordinary Measures, someone he’s admired since he was sneaking out of school to watch Star Wars, was above and beyond. “Once I got past my hero worship for Harrison Ford, I was able to work with him,” says Fraser. The two actors, veterans of their respective archaeological action movie franchises, spent time together both on set and off, going out for dinners and for flights in Ford’s plane, which Fraser calls “Air Force Harrison.”“I think it’s really important to learn from the people who you could say you were a fan of when you were younger,” he says. “It’s a gift to be lucky enough to be able to do that.”
Among the things Fraser gained from Ford, who plays a scientist in the film, was an appreciation for research. “What I liked so much about his method,” Fraser says, “is that he’s a huge proponent of authenticity. So he spent a great deal of time with chemists, with pharmaceutical executives, you know, at the laboratory. He really just rolled his sleeves up and got to know everything. And I’ve worked with other actors before who had worked with him. And they said if there’s a bank heist movie or something like that, he’s like ‘No, we have to figure out how to rob a bank in order to shoot the movie properly.’ I don’t know who he consulted with...but he made sure he had as much knowledge as possible. I really like that about him.”
Ford is someone who, unlike Fraser, has spent a long time playing characters that are all cut from fairly similar cloth. Not that that makes it any less enjoyable to watch, it just makes Fraser’s career, when held up side by side, look all the more unusual. Ask him if he regrets any of the films he’s made, and he answers definitively in the negative. “You learn something from everything you make. Even if the lesson is, ‘Don’t make a movie like that,’ then you learned something, didn’t you? But you can’t learn unless you get up there and do it.”
After a little while, the talk turns to photography (“I think you should have something you’re really spectacularly bad at but still have fun doing, just so you don’t go crazy in your professional life”), books he’s enjoyed (currently, one about Gauguin and Van Gogh) and movies he’s enjoyed watching recently (introducing his kids to Star Wars) and Flight of the Conchords (he’s a HUGE fan). But eventually, we get back to where we started: the funny career. It’s kind of hard to get away from, really. “The truth is,” he says, “I think I just like the variety. I think it’s important to keep diversity as a touchstone in an interesting career. It’s a personal view. Sometimes you want a cheeseburger, sometimes you want fine sushi. What can I say?” Fraser is laughing again now, that same weird giggle, and he really doesn’t need to say anything else.
