Brendan Fraser speaks about his disappearence, rebirth, sexual harrasment, and reflections - Sensationalist Headlines

[url]https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser[/url] An incredibly interesting article. Some interesting parts (there's a lot more in this article:) [QUOTE]“By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China,” which was 2008, “I was put together with tape and ice—just, like, really nerdy and fetishy about ice packs. Screw-cap ice packs and downhill-mountain-biking pads, 'cause they're small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily.” Eventually all these injuries required multiple surgeries: “I needed a laminectomy. And the lumbar didn't take, so they had to do it again a year later.” There was a partial knee replacement. Some more work on his back, bolting various compressed spinal pads together. At one point he needed to have his vocal cords repaired. All told, Fraser says, he was in and out of hospitals for almost seven years. He laughs a small, sad laugh. “This is gonna really probably be a little saccharine for you,” Fraser warns. “But I felt like the horse from Animal Farm, whose job it was to work and work and work. Orwell wrote a character who was, I think, the proletariat. He worked for the good of the whole, he didn't ask questions, he didn't make trouble until it killed him.… I don't know if I've been sent to the glue factory, but I've felt like I've had to rebuild shit that I've built that got knocked down and do it again for the good of everyone. Whether it hurts you or not.”[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]Danny Boyle, an executive producer of the series, cast Fraser after seeing The Affair, in which Fraser was a prison guard who seemed to harbor some dark secrets. Boyle says he was drawn to the deftness of the performance—“I utterly believed him”—but he also just liked the sensation of seeing Fraser again. “It's one of those delicious moments where you see someone you're so familiar with who is so changed by time and by experience. You kind of just clock that, and it's both so sad and wonderful. Because we all share that same time line.”[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]When his episodes of The Affair began airing, in late 2016, Fraser was asked to give his first interview in years, for AOL's YouTube channel. It is an uncomfortable watch. Fraser seems morose and sad; for much of it, he speaks in a near whisper. The video went viral. In the months that followed, theories sprang up about what ailed him, focusing on his 2009 divorce and the fact that two franchises he'd once starred in, The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, had been rebooted and recast without him. As it turns out, what was behind the sad Brendan Fraser meme was…sadness. His mother had died of cancer just days before the interview. “I buried my mom,” Fraser says. “I think I was in mourning, and I didn't know what that meant.” He hadn't done press in a while; suddenly he was sitting on a stool in front of an audience, promoting the third season of a show he'd barely been on. “I wasn't quite sure what the format was. And I felt like: Man, I got fucking old. Damn, this is the way it's done now?”[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]“I always notice with comic actors, when they can do that stuff really well, you don't notice this great integrity in the way they're doing it,” Danny Boyle says. “Because obviously you notice the cartoon effect of what they're doing, and it's very pleasurable. But in order for it to work, it actually has to have integrity. It is in some way based on truth and honesty.”[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]Certain pieces of what he tells me have already been told, it turns out—but this is the first time he's ever spoken publicly about any of it. The story he wants to relay took place, he says, in the summer of 2003, in the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a luncheon held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that hosts the Golden Globes. On Fraser's way out of the hotel, he was hailed by Philip Berk, a former president of the HFPA. In the midst of a crowded room, Berk reached out to shake Fraser's hand. Much of what happened next Berk recounted in his memoir and was also reported by Sharon Waxman in The New York Times: He pinched Fraser's ass—in jest, according to Berk. But Fraser says what Berk did was more than a pinch: “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.” Fraser says that in this moment he was overcome with panic and fear. Fraser eventually was able, he says, to remove Berk's hand. “I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry.” He rushed out of the room, outside, past a police officer he couldn't quite bring himself to confess to, and then home, where he told his then wife, Afton, what had happened. “I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me,” he says now. (In an e-mail, Berk, who is still an HFPA member, disputed Fraser's account: “Mr. Fraser's version is a total fabrication.”) ... He knows now that people wonder what happened to Brendan Fraser, how he went from a highly visible public figure to practically disappearing in the public mind, and he'd already told me most of it. But this, he says, is the final piece. The experience, he says, “made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive.” He wondered if the HFPA had blacklisted him. “I don't know if this curried disfavor with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening.” Fraser says he was rarely invited back to the Globes after 2003. Berk denies that the HFPA retaliated against Fraser: “His career declined through no fault of ours.”[/QUOTE] [QUOTE] “I started telling you this because all of this intrigue was going around while I was shooting Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is about a stuntman…who was Brendan Fraser's stuntman. And then the stuntman meets Brendan Fraser at the end. He meets Brendan Fraser and punches him out.” Fraser says when the day came to shoot the scene where he punches himself out, he put on the most ostentatious clothes he could find to play Brendan Fraser. “It was my vision of the worst version of myself. And I get to deck me.” And the point, finally, is this: [B]“The reason I was adamant about wanting to do that”—by which he means take a film role with a bunch of cartoons that involved punching himself in the face—“even if I didn't realize it until much, much later, is that at that time I think I wanted to knock myself out. I wanted to take the piss out of myself before someone else would, 'cause I had it in my head that I had it coming.”[/B][/QUOTE]

I would love to see Brendan Fraser make a comeback in action/adventure films (along the lines of The Mummy rather than Journey to the Center of the Earth). I hope he regains the confidence to return one day soon, and for the better.

[QUOTE=-Ben_Wolfe-;53152427]I would love to see Brendan Fraser make a comeback in action/adventure films (along the lines of The Mummy rather than Journey to the Center of the Earth). I hope he regains the confidence to return one day soon, and for the better.[/QUOTE] Would be nice to see him back in shape aswell.

The man didn't deserve what happened to him. I'm really hoping things turn around for him.

I saw this earlier today, it seems like hanging out with him would be such a unique experience that would change your outlook on the world. Especially considering how he was able to reach the top so quickly, fall so hard, and he still found some sort of peace in his life years down the line. I kinda feel bad for his ex-wife now, since a lot of people had thought that she was responsible for his depression, because of how the courts were charging him an insane amount for alimony.

Seems like he's past the point of doing action movies but I can still see him in more sedentary roles. I'd love to see him move more into dramatic roles but I guess that depends on whether he wants to get back into the spotlight of showbiz, he sounds a little done with the industry.

[QUOTE=cdr248;53152546]Seems like he's past the point of doing action movies but I can still see him in more sedentary roles. I'd love to see him move more into dramatic roles but I guess that depends on whether he wants to get back into the spotlight of showbiz, he sounds a little done with the industry.[/QUOTE] As long as he stays away from cheap kids flicks.

monkeybone reboot when

[QUOTE=BrandoJack;53152538]I kinda feel bad for his ex-wife now, since a lot of people had thought that she was responsible for his depression, because of how the courts were charging him an insane amount for alimony.[/QUOTE] That ordeal might not have been the main cause but I think it certainly would have played a part.

I'd cast brendan

I guess the vocal chord surgery probably 99% explains why he sounds so quiet and defeated when talking - what a damn shame.

[QUOTE=butre;53152834]monkeybone reboot when[/QUOTE] I think you meant to ask: Monkeybone [b][i]cinematic universe[/i][/b] when?

Call Netflix. Theyll give him a nice job with a good show. i want him to come back.

[QUOTE]“I'm okay,” he says. “I think I just need to let some arrows fly.” He excuses himself as I ponder what this means. A few minutes go by. When he returns, it's with a leather quiver full of arrows strapped to his back. He steps out onto his porch. Outside, he lofts a bow, nocks an arrow. Down below on his lawn, maybe 75 yards away, is an archery target. He releases the arrow straight into the target's center. Bull's-eye. Then nocks a second arrow, and does it again. Finally, he exhales. “I feel a lot better now,” he says. He hands me the bow: “Okay, now you try.”[/QUOTE] Brendan Fraser sounds awesome, perhaps even more so than he did before. Seriously though, I recommend reading the whole article, he sounds quite genuine - that's obviously the point of this kind of writing, but in this case it doesn't sound particularly conceited.

It's good to know that in the end Brendan came out okay, more than okay. Whenever he was brought up, images of a depressed and broke former star would be conjured up in my mind. But despite all the professional and personal setbacks he's had he has a nice home, steady work doing what he loves and having time with his family. Along with coming out a lot wiser and seasoned in the end. Brendan made it, and that is awesome.