Brendan Fraser

The Physical Toll of Commercial Success

Brendan Fraser wrapped filming on The Mummy in 1999 with his body battered by the stunts. He didn't use stunt doubles for the action scenes, and that decision took a physical toll that would follow him for the next two decades. He underwent surgery for a lumbar laminectomy, a partial knee replacement, and vocal cord repair.

The price of being an action hero was an endless list of surgeries.

Before the big budgets, he had already shown he could carry weighty dramas. In 1992, he starred in School Ties alongside a young Matt Damon, playing a Jewish student who faces antisemitism at an elite prep school. But his role in Encino Man that same year is what fixed his image as an innocent, physically imposing guy in the public's mind.

In 1997, George of the Jungle arrived. For the role, Fraser pushed his body to the limit with a strict diet and a workout regimen that left him mentally foggy, as he would later admit. The movie grossed more than $170 million worldwide and made him one of the industry's most bankable actors.

The The Mummy franchise cemented his status between 1999 and 2008. But while audiences saw an unstoppable adventurer, the actor was living with ice packs and duct tape holding his joints together. The industry chewed him up without mercy when his health began to falter.

And the phone stopped ringing.

An Exile Forced by the Studios

In 2003, an incident occurred that would change his career in a way the press of the time barely noticed. Fraser accused Philip Berk (then president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) of sexually assaulting him in a Beverly Hills hotel. The organization ignored his complaint, and the actor felt his name had been put on a blacklist.

Adding to this trauma were an expensive divorce in 2007 and the death of his mother. Fraser withdrew to his farm in Bedford, New York, and accepted minor roles in productions that barely got distribution. During those eight years of going in and out of hospitals, the general public forgot the face that had dominated box offices in the late nineties.

It was a slow, quiet disappearance.

An Actor’s Comeback in 2022

In 2022, director Darren Aronofsky cast him in the lead role in The Whale. To play Charlie, a professor with morbid obesity, Fraser had to wear a 130-pound prosthetic suit that took six hours to put on. The physical demands were extreme once again, but this time the goal was purely dramatic.

Critics around the world embraced his performance at the Venice Film Festival. In March 2023, he won the Oscar for Best Actor after an awards season in which the industry recognized his comeback. But he didn't stall in chamber drama, and that same year he worked under Martin Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon.

In 2024, he filmed the action comedy Brothers alongside Peter Dinklage for Amazon MGM Studios. Fraser still lives in New York and earns a base salary of around $12 million per major project. The distribution deal for his latest film included a clause calling for a simultaneous release in 2,500 theaters across the United States.