The Brendan Fraser renaissance has arrived – and we are here for it

Older millennials will testify: Towards the end of the last millennium, Brendan Fraser was among Hollywood’s biggest stars. With his wide-eyed, muscular yet vulnerable man shtick, he ascended from being the outsider to commander of huge Hollywood vehicles such as the Mummy series. Long before Marvel patented it, Fraser played the guy who could take on a battalion of bad guys while making quips at once.

He played the handsome caveman (Encino Man), the feral man-child (George of the Jungle), the naive guy who’s lived his entire life in a fallout shelter (Blast from the Past). Each of these characters emerges into a world entirely unknown to him – modern, urban, un-wild – and that he must learn to negotiate.

Brendan Fraser was first among ‘himbos’ – dudes who have a lot of brawn power, but are somewhat weaker in the brain department; think Chris Hemsworth as Thor. At the same time, Brendan Fraser also took on serious, dramatic roles – notably, playing alongside Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters (1998), and Michael Caine in The Quiet American (2002). It had always been abundantly clear that there was more to Brendan Fraser than the himbo shtick but, as several op-eds have observed, that was a time when Hollywood (as any other major film industry in the world) siloed its stars into stereotypes that were hard to shake off.

By the time the Mummy series launched in 1999, Fraser had carved his path to global stardom by flexing his good looks, innate good-naturedness and considerable bodily strength for the outlier. Like Tom Cruise, Fraser did a lot of his own stunts. Unlike Cruise, these didn’t always include heroic stuff like jumping off skyscrapers and dangling off helicopters; but actually crashing into things ostensibly to highlight the comedic aspect of the himbo. It made Brendan Fraser and his characters endearing.

At the absolute peak of his fame – circa the Mummy series, which began in 1999 and became the biggest commercial success in his filmography – Brendan Fraser was a household name around the world. But a decade later, he had almost vanished from the public consciousness. How could this have happened?

The stunts, it turned out, were a pretty big reason for Fraser’s career slowing down. In a 2018 profile in GQ magazine – the definitive piece on Fraser even four years later – he talked about the massive toll that doing all those stunts took on his body. “By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China [...] I was put together with tape and ice,” he said. He invested heavily in “screw-cap ice packs and downhill-mountain-biking pads because they're small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily."

A bitter divorce from his wife Afton came about in 2007. But according to the most shocking reveal of that GQ profile, the thing that really shook him to his core was a case of sexual assault by the ex-President of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It made him question everything, retreat into himself, he said. In 2018, in the middle of MeToo and TimesUp, he found the courage to speak out about it. He was one of a handful of male actors who alleged sexual assault – Terry Crews (Brooklyn 99), Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Michael Gaston (The Man in the High Castle) being some of the others – and shed light on a still under-explored aspect of the industry’s power imbalance.

It was around that time that the term ‘Brenaissance’ began to do the rounds on TikTok. Following the 2018 profile, and as he began to work again – in TV series like The Affair, Trust, Doom Patrol and even a Bollywood film, the Godfather-like Line of Descent by Rohit Karn Batra – clips of Fraser being candid in interviews began to go viral.

The social media machine feeds on nostalgia, which has now settled into a 20-year regenerative cycle. So it wasn’t too surprising when clips from George of the Jungle, Mummy and more also began to trend. For the Gen-Z or those who didn’t grow up with Fraser being a fixture on cable movie channels or one of their first celebrity crushes, there is much to admire in the authenticity, courage and kindness he appears to embody. Those who did grow up watching him, now rejoice in seeing an old, familiar face back in new, rejuvenated form.

Celebrities vanishing from and returning to the limelight – like Winona Ryder or Robert Downey Jr – isn’t a new phenomenon. Celebrities revamping their screen image by making “better” or more meaningful choices – like Mathew McConaughey and Leonardo di Caprio – isn’t either.

But right now, there seems to be something uniquely participatory, interactive, immersive, and therefore more thrilling about the celebrity comeback. When Britney Spears’ collaboration with Elton John, “Hold Me Closer”, hits #1 on the Billboard charts, her fans (new and old) feel they’ve reaped dividends for their investment in the #FreeBritney movement. When Will Smith posts a self-deprecatory video on Instagram months after the infamous slap, and lands the joke, friends and fans turn up in millions to leave fire emojis and bring him one step closer to being “uncancelled”.

From exoskeletons to prosthetics – it’s been a long road for Brendan Fraser. The Whale may be leaving critics divided on its depiction of obesity, but the clamour around his performance is unanimous. In interviews, his passion for acting (not stardom) is clear. “I developed muscles I did not know I had,” said Fraser at the Venice press conference about wearing the prosthetic suit. “I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed…It gave me appreciation for those whose bodies are similar. You need to be an incredibly strong person, mentally and physically, to inhabit that physical being.”

Soon, Brendan Fraser will be seen in a Martin Scorcese original – Killers of the Flower Moon – and flexing his comic timing in Max Barbakow’s Brothers. In a recent Vanity Fair piece about the making of The Whale, Fraser says: “I want to learn from the people I’m working with at this point in my career. I’ve had such variety, a lot of high highs and low lows, so what I’m keen for, in the second half of my time doing this, is to feel like I’m contributing to the craft and I’m learning from it.”

You can’t help but want to root for him.