Brendan Fraser was once Hollywood’s love child, his blue-eyed, golden-haired boy who would become a ubiquitous presence throughout the ’90s. worldwide with its decisive role in Encino Man. This role would go on to define and dictate his place in Hollywood for the rest of the decade to come.
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When Fraser began garnering more publicity due to his wide-eyed on-screen characterizations, his filmography peaked in a genre that cast him in the mold of a wide-eyed man-boy. He quickly landed the roles that would make him a household name – Blast from the past, Dudley Do Right, George of the Jungle, School tiesand of course, The Mummy franchise.
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Hollywood’s physical toll on Brendan Fraser
Over time, the unprecedented horrors of overexposure to the spotlight and constant work on films gradually began to accumulate and take a toll on Fraser’s physical health. Coupled with the sexual assault he suffered in 2003, the subsequent decade he spent under the knife in hospitals and the loss of his mother in 2016, Fraser could not catch a break. Speaking of his health, he says:
“By the time I made the third ‘Mummy’ photo in china i was put together with duct tape and ice…i was building myself an exoskeleton every day. I needed a laminectomy. And the lower back didn’t take, so they had to start over a year later.
In the GQ interview, he then revealed the partial knee replacement that was needed, followed by additional work on his back that involved bolting multiple compressed spinal pads together. Fraser also had to have his vocal cords repaired, at one point.
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Brendan Fraser’s assault at the hands of Philip Beck
In 2003, at a luncheon hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Fraser was hosted by Philip Berk, now a former president of the HFPA. However, the incident escalated into sexual misconduct on Berk’s part, which Fraser recounts in this heartbreaking and gruesome detail:
“His left hand reaches out, grabs my ass and one of his fingers touches me in the dirt. And he starts to move it. I felt sick. I felt like a little child. I felt like I had a lump in my throat. I thought I was going to cry. I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint at me. I didn’t want to face how it made me feel, or for it to become part of my narrative.
GQ reports that Brendan Fraser’s representatives demanded a formal written apology from Philip Berk and although the latter sent a note, he later claimed, “My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual ‘If I did anything that upset Mr Fraser, it was unintentional and I apologize. “”
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Fans are rallying behind Brendan Fraser in the wake of bat girl
After the incident at the HFPA, Brendan Fraser began to be blacklisted from the Golden Globes (which is hosted by the organization). He began to be excluded from calls for film or series offers and slowly disappeared from the public eye. Years later, he would land a role in the third season of The case. Slowly, but surely, the actor then emerged from the incident which left him depressed and with a conflicted identity of who he was.
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His roles in DC’s Doom Patrol and bat girl brought him back to center stage. Fraser was supposed to appear as Firefly, one of the main antagonists in DC comics who had never been depicted on such a scale. However, with Zaslav’s direction cutting off the film’s take-off, Fraser again finds himself thrown back into the unfair and restless undercurrents of public oblivion.
Source: GQ
