Brendan Fraser is an icon. As a millennial, his roles in The Mummy trilogy, George of the Jungle, and many other comedy performances endeared him to my heart. This is why watching his comeback feels so wonderful.
During a virtual TikTok meet and greet, Fraser spoke to fans, and it was brought up that he is going to be in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The film is based on the non-fiction book of the same name, about a series of murders that plagued the Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma during the 1920s. The murders came after oil was discovered on their land and the Osage people were granted, in court, the right to profit from oil found on their land. That ruling made them targets.
Fraser will be playing lawyer WS Hamilton in the film.
This news was exciting, and the phrase “Brenaissance” has been popping up across social media. Fraser joked that he was feeling sick at the prospect of working alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in Flower Moon.
“The internet is so behind you! We’re so supportive,” one of the fans said. “There are so many people out there who love you, and we’re rooting for you, and we can’t wait to see what you do next.”
Fraser got choked up and tipped his hat to the fan: “Shucks, ma’am.”
That moment only further cemented why it is that we love Brendan Fraser.
The actor has been slowly making his way back to film and has been killing it with Doom Patrol on HBO Max, but it is important, as we celebrate his return, to remember what led to him being gone for so long.
It was a combination of the physical agony of the action roles he did and being allegedly groped by Philip Berk, a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, back in summer 2003—something we covered when it was revealed in an article in GQ:
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.
Fraser says that he, “became depressed,” and then he started taking the blame for what happened: “I was blaming myself and I was miserable—because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel.’ That summer wore on—and I can’t remember what I went on to work on next.” The experience “made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive.”
Brendan Fraser’s “Brenaissance” is built on his resilience as a human being. That is why, more than anything else, I am happy about seeing a genuinely good guy get his due.
(via IndieWire, image: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for A+E Networks)
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