Brendan Fraser

• 1. Introduction

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  In September 2022, the film The Whale premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, and the audience gave its star, Brendan Fraser, a standing ovation that lasted six minutes. Fraser is an American and Canadian actor, and that night marked a return to the spotlight after years in which the industry seemed to have misplaced him. How does a performer end up in that room? Why did the offers thin out for so long? And what did it take to keep working while they did? The answers begin far from any film set, in a family that rarely stayed in one place.

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• 2. Restless Childhood

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  Brendan James Fraser was born on the 3rd of December 1968 in Indianapolis, the youngest of four boys. His brothers are Kevin, Sean and Regan. His parents, Carol Mary and Peter Fraser, were both Canadian. His mother worked as a sales counselor, and his father was a former journalist who became a Canadian foreign service officer with the Government Office of Tourism.

  His mother's brother, George Genereux, was the only Canadian to win a gold medal at the 1952 Summer Olympics. He won it in the Olympic Trap, a shooting event. The family tree also carries Irish, Scottish, German, Czech and French-Canadian ancestry.

  Eureka, California, was one stop among many. The Frasers also lived in Seattle, Ottawa, the Netherlands and Switzerland during his childhood. His schooling included a Montessori school in Detroit, the Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington, and later Upper Canada College.

  A family vacation in London in the 1970s changed his direction. There he saw Oliver! in the West End, his first professional theater show, and it sparked his interest in acting. He later sang in the chorus of a high-school production of Oklahoma!

  Fraser graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle in 1990. He then began acting at a small acting college in New York City. A Master of Fine Arts in Acting at Southern Methodist University was his next plan, but a visit to Hollywood changed his mind. He gave up the degree and moved there to look for film work.

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• 3. Cavemen And Quarterbacks

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  In 1991, Fraser made his film debut in Dogfight, playing a seaman headed for Vietnam in a small role. It was a modest beginning for a career that would soon accelerate.

  Encino Man, released in 1992, gave him his first leading part, opposite Sean Astin and Pauly Shore. Fraser played a frozen prehistoric caveman who is thawed out in the present day. The comedy was a moderate box office success, and it has since gained a cult following.

  The same year brought School Ties, where he shared the screen with rising actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris O'Donnell. Fraser played a Jewish star quarterback who confronts antisemitism embedded in the world of a private prep school. Few debut years offer a comic caveman and a serious drama side by side.

  From 1994 to 1997 he kept working steadily. With Honors in 1994 put him next to Joe Pesci, and Airheads the same year paired him with Steve Buscemi and Adam Sandler. The Passion of Darkly Noon followed in 1995, then Mrs. Winterbourne in 1996 and The Twilight of the Golds in 1997. He also had a small part in the 1995 film Now and Then.

  The caveman did not disappear. Fraser made cameo appearances reprising his Encino Man role in two Pauly Shore films, Son in Law in 1993 and In the Army Now in 1994.

  In 1995 he also stepped onto a stage for the first time as a professional. At the Geffen Playhouse he played Victor in John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone. The theater would pull him back again, as the next years would show.

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• 4. Adventurer And Actor

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  George of the Jungle, released in 1997, gave Fraser his first major box office success. The comedy was based on an animated series created by Jay Ward.

  Gods and Monsters, in 1998, showed a different side of him and earned him critical acclaim. Bill Condon wrote and directed the film, which was based on the life of James Whale, the director of Frankenstein. Ian McKellen played Whale as a tortured and ailing filmmaker. Fraser played the gardener who forms a bond with him. The story deals with lost creativity and ambiguous sexuality.

  Then came Rick O'Connell, the lead adventurer in The Mummy, released in 1999. It was his biggest commercial success. A sequel, The Mummy Returns, followed in 2001, and the series established him as one of the biggest film stars of the 1990s.

  Between those two Mummy films he stayed busy. Dudley Do-Right in 1999 was drawn from another Jay Ward cartoon. Blast from the Past, also in 1999, did well as a romantic comedy. Bedazzled in 2000 remade a British film of the same name from 1967, and Monkeybone in 2001 mixed stop-motion with live action. He also lent his voice to the unreleased animated film Big Bug Man, alongside Marlon Brando.

  In late 2001, Fraser played Brick in Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Anthony Page. Ned Beatty, Frances O'Connor and Gemma Jones were among his castmates. The show closed on the 12th of January 2002, and Fraser collected many excellent reviews.

  In 2002, critics received The Quiet American well, in which he starred opposite Michael Caine. In 2003 he was the human lead, D.J. Drake, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and he also voiced the Tasmanian Devil. In 2004 he joined the ensemble of Crash, which won an Academy Award. He played the District Attorney of Los Angeles, husband of the character played by Sandra Bullock. He also guest starred on Scrubs, King of the Hill and The Simpsons.

  Filming for the third Mummy film, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, started in Montreal on the 27th of July 2007. Jet Li co-starred as Emperor Han. It reached theaters in August 2008, after a six-year gap in the franchise. That same year Fraser starred in a 3D adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. He also led Inkheart, where the novel's author, Cornelia Funke, personally chose him for the role.

  Canada's Walk of Fame inducted him in March 2006, making him the first American-born actor to receive that honor. As of 2022, however, he still had no star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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• 5. Life Off Screen

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  On the 4th of July 1993, shortly after reaching Los Angeles, Fraser met the actress Afton Smith at a barbecue at Winona Ryder's house. Smith later appeared as a minor cast member in George of the Jungle. They married on the 27th of September 1998 and had three sons, born in 2002-2004 and 2006.

  In April 2007, the couple sold their Beverly Hills home for $3 million. In December 2007, Fraser's publicist announced that they had decided to divorce. The court ordered monthly alimony of $50,000 for ten years or until Smith remarried, whichever came first. It also set child support at $25,000 a month.

  The money dispute dragged on for years. In early 2011, Fraser asked the court to reduce his alimony, saying he could not meet the annual obligation of $600,000. He did not contest the child support. Late in 2011, Smith accused him of fraudulently failing to disclose some assets, including contracts for two films, Extraordinary Measures and Furry Vengeance. In 2014, the court ruled against both his request and her allegation.

  Through it all, Fraser and Smith both drew public praise for staying actively involved in their sons' lives. Smith has since turned from acting to book-writing and real estate.

  Since 2018, Fraser has served as a celebrity judge at the annual Dancing Stars of Greenwich charity gala. It raises money for Abilis, a nonprofit supporting more than 800 individuals and their families with disabilities in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Smith takes part in the dance competition as well. In 2022, the two of them received the Heart of Abilis Award for their support and fundraising.

  Fraser lives in Bedford, New York. Since September 2022 he has been in a relationship with makeup artist Jeanne Moore, and the pair made their red-carpet debut at the Venice Film Festival that month. He speaks French and sits on the board of directors for FilmAid International.

  He is also an accomplished amateur photographer who has used instant cameras on screen. On his first appearance on Scrubs, he used a Polaroid pack film camera. On his second, he used a Holga fitted with a Polaroid back, a Japanese-only model. He is an accomplished amateur archer too.

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• 6. The Quiet Years

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  In 2010, Fraser returned to Broadway in Elling, but lackluster reviews closed the play after only one week. That same year he appeared in Furry Vengeance, which critics panned. Afterward he moved from the William Morris Endeavor agency to Creative Artists Agency. He also starred in Whole Lotta Sole, directed by Terry George.

  A bigger problem arrived in 2011. Fraser was set to play William Tell in The Legend of William Tell: 3D, directed by Eric Brevig, with whom he had worked on Journey to the Center of the Earth. Filming was delayed, and late in 2011 Fraser sued the producer, Todd Moyer, for promised wages. Moyer countersued for assault. Fraser dismissed that as a desperate attempt to avoid paying his debt.

  The parts that followed were smaller and stranger. In 2013, Fraser played an Elvis Presley impersonator in the ensemble black comedy Pawn Shop Chronicles. In 2016, he replaced Ray Liotta in the Bollywood thriller Line of Descent.

  In 2018, Fraser spoke publicly about the physical toll of his action roles. The stunts and other demands of certain films had led to several surgeries over seven years. They included a partial knee replacement, a laminectomy and vocal-cord surgery. That same year, he disclosed something far heavier.

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• 7. The Berk Allegation

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  In a 2018 GQ article, Fraser accused Philip Berk of groping him at an industry luncheon in 2003. Berk was then president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, or HFPA, the nonprofit organization whose members vote on the Golden Globe Awards. Fraser said the incident triggered a mental health crisis and a fear of speaking up that might harm his career.

  Berk at first called Fraser's account a "total fabrication". Yet in his 2014 memoir, Berk had acknowledged groping Fraser "in jest".

  The stress piled up. Fraser's divorce, his health problems, the death of his mother and the need to discuss the Berk incident together plunged him into a depression. That depression led to a break in his career.

  Several publications and social media users concluded that Hollywood had blacklisted him for speaking out. In the 2018 GQ article, Fraser said: "The phone does stop ringing in your career, and you start asking yourself why. There's many reasons, but was my allegation one of them? I think it was."

  He later offered a different view. On the radio show Sway in the Morning in 2019, he said: "I don't think the HFPA really wield that much power."

  In 2022, he told GQ that if the HFPA nominated him for a Golden Globe for his latest film, The Whale, he would "not participate" because of his "history" with the organization. It nominated him for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama. He stayed away from the ceremony, and the award went to Austin Butler.

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• 8. The Brennaissance

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  Television gave Fraser a way back. He joined the recurring cast of The Affair, the Showtime drama, in season 3, playing a misery-minded prison guard named Gunther. In the FX anthology series Trust, which premiered on the 25th of March 2018, he played James Fletcher Chace, a fixer for the Getty family.

  He also became Cliff Steele, the character known as Robotman, in the Titans series. Jake Michaels physically portrayed the character there, and Riley Shanahan later replaced Michaels. In the spin-off Doom Patrol, Fraser voices Robotman and appears as Steele in flashbacks, while Shanahan plays the robot body.

  Fans named his return "The Brennaissance". On The Graham Norton Show, Fraser acknowledged the portmanteau.

  In September 2020, Steven Soderbergh cast him as the gangster Doug Jones in the period crime film No Sudden Move, released in 2021. In January 2021, Darren Aronofsky announced Fraser as the lead of The Whale. Aronofsky had searched for the right actor for a decade. He settled on Fraser after seeing the trailer for a low-budget Brazilian film, Journey to the End of the Night. "A light bulb went off, and I was like, 'Oh, that guy can do it'", Aronofsky said.

  To prepare, Fraser told The New York Times, the Obesity Action Coalition connected him with many people living with obesity. He spoke with eight or ten of them over Zoom calls. Some were bedridden, and others were fully mobile.

  The performance won him the Oscar for Best Actor, making him the first Canadian to win in that category. During his acceptance speech at the 95th Academy Awards, he thanked Jeanne Moore.

  Other projects piled up. Fraser was announced for Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Max Barbakow's comedy Brothers. In October 2021, he was cast as the villain Firefly in the superhero film Batgirl. Warner Bros. changed its studio priorities, and the film's release was canceled in August 2022.

  His voice reached listeners too. In autumn 2023, he took part in The Downloaded, an audiodrama written by Robert J. Sawyer and released as an Audible exclusive. In December 2023, he was a guest narrator at Disney's Candlelight Processional at Walt Disney World. In July 2024, it was announced that he would play Dwight D. Eisenhower in Pressure. Rental Family followed in 2025.

  In November 2025, it was reported that Fraser would return as Rick O'Connell in a fourth Mummy film.

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