![]() ![]() For much of the 1990s, Fraser spent a lot of time emerging wide-eyed from bomb shelters (Blast from the Past) or Canada (Dudley Do-Right) or the rain forest (George of the Jungle), but he also took on more serious roles. He had the unique quality of a man beholding the world for the first time, and directors began casting him as exactly that. In Encino Man, the film that helped turn him into a star, Fraser played a caveman recently freed from a block of ice in modern-day California he likes to joke, or simply recount, that his audition consisted of wordlessly wrestling a plant. He was big and handsome in a broad, unthreatening way, and most important, he was game. This would become an on-screen signature of Fraser's: crashing into things. I think I bruised a rib, but I was like: That's okay! I'll take it. ![]() And I got my Screen Actors Guild card and an extra 50 bucks for the stunt adjustment, ’cause they threw me into a pinball machine. “They gave me a sailor outfit, along with some other guys, and we did a punch-up scene with some Marines. Fraser's first acting job was in a 1991 film called Dogfight, starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. He starts, uncharacteristically, at the beginning. “Chillax, maybe?”Īnd so these synthetic flutes end up being the soundtrack to Fraser's story. “I thought this would be chill,” he says when he returns. He disappears for a moment, and then suddenly the sound of synthesizers comes from the speakers overhead, followed by a Pandora ad. He was there on the poster, year after year, and then he wasn't, and it took him turning up in a supporting part in the third season of a premium-cable show, The Affair, for many of us to even realize that he'd been gone. And though his run as a leading man in studio films lasted to the end of this past decade, he's been missing, or at least somewhere off in the margins, for some time now. ![]() If you watched movies at the end of the previous century, you watched Brendan Fraser. He was in Encino Man and School Ties in 1992, Airheads in 1994, George of the Jungle in 1997, The Mummy in 1999. I'm 35: There was a time when the sight of Fraser was as familiar to me as the furniture in my parents' house. Blue-gray stubble around the once mighty chin, gray long-sleeve shirt draped indifferently over the once mighty body. His eyes are pale and a bit watery these days-less wide than they used to be when he was new to the screen, playing guys who were often new to the world. You wander in and then emerge, hours or days later, disoriented but appreciative that something so unpredictable can still exist in this world. He can't help but digress-“Instead of telling you what time it is, I might give you the history of horology,” he says, in the middle of saying something else. But that is the way it is, I'm learning, with Brendan Fraser. Why he does this is a question with a few different, surprising answers. And though he's been traveling for most of this past year, going back and forth between Toronto, where he was shooting a series based on Three Days of the Condor called Condor, and Europe, where he was shooting Trust, an FX series about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III produced by Danny Boyle, he makes sure to stop in and visit Pecas every few weeks or so. Fraser lives nearby and owns property that overlooks this farm, about an hour north of Manhattan. “Without doing too much-what's the word? Anthropomorphic…anthropomorphizing… Without pretending that the animal is a human, he looked like he needed help. They were filming down in Mexico, he says, when he and the horse had a shared moment of recognition. Fraser played a mid-19th-century Texas Ranger. Fraser met him on the set of a 2015 History Channel series, Texas Rising. The horse's name is Pecas-the Spanish word for freckles. He removes a green bandanna from his pocket and gently wipes the animal's eyes. “I got this horse because it's a big horse,” he says, standing in a barn in Bedford, New York. Brendan Fraser wants me to meet his horse. ![]()
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