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I thought he had a kind of lightness, an ease, that had not been much in evidence when we last met. It had been a while since we’d seen each other. Fraser said his mother’s father used to come here for lunch, back in the 1920s. We took a car to Grand Central and wandered through clouds of commuters, asking for directions along the way, until we found the Grand Central Oyster Bar. “I’d never been in that microscope before,” Fraser said, about what it was like to receive the ovation in Venice. He is himself, but in a crowd now, for the first time in years-and in certain crowds, for the first time ever. But this is what his life is like now: the same, but different. The suit he is crying in-well: “ Crying is a word that’s, like, you’ve injured yourself, or there’s some harm done I think I honestly was just smiling so hard my face leaked”-is probably one of the very few off-the-rack garments in the theater. A clip of the moment, with Fraser in tears, quickly went viral.
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A sudden downpour had driven a few random customers in off the street, and so he shared the dressing rooms as sales associates weaved back and forth with stuff for him to try on.Ībout a month earlier, at the Venice Film Festival, where The Whale had its world premiere, Fraser had been supplied with some suits, but they didn’t fit, and so he had to stop at Richards, a department store in Greenwich, Connecticut, more or less on his way to the airport, to pick up the outfit he ended up wearing to the event.Ī few days later, Fraser received a standing ovation at the festival for his performance in the film. Um, I don’t remember, honestly”), and so he was starting from scratch. But for Fraser, it had been a while (“A dog’s year, at least. Once upon a time, these would’ve been provided to Fraser well in advance-work as an actor long enough, and attend enough premieres, and most fashion houses have your sizes on file and are eager to help you with whatever you might need. He and Aronofsky were taking The Whale to a bunch of film festivals-London, Mill Valley, Montclair-and Fraser needed clothes. One day in the fall, in midtown Manhattan, Fraser was in the back of a Brooks Brothers, being fitted for a suit. (Berk disputes Fraser’s account.) The experience, Fraser said then, “made me retreat.” He felt, he said, like “something had been taken away from me.” The incident had colored his life ever since, in ways that sometimes felt small and sometimes felt very big indeed.
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And he shared a startling allegation: that a once powerful man named Philip Berk, a former president and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that stages the Golden Globes, had groped and assaulted Fraser at a 2003 luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He talked about the reasons that had led him to step back from Hollywood, or that had led Hollywood to step back from him-he still wasn’t quite sure which it was. He talked about the ways in which his body had failed him after years of doing stunts on film sets.
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The story, briefly, is this: A few years ago, Fraser sat down and relayed to a journalist a series of things he had not previously talked about in public. Perhaps, like the vulnerable men and women at the fan conventions, you’re aware of what Fraser is referring to here perhaps you have no idea. “In their words,” he told me, “they say I was their childhood.”
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Some come because they see in Fraser-an actor who was a fixture of the biggest movies of the 1990s and early 2000s, the star of School Ties and Encino Man and Looney Tunes: Back in Action-some ineffable connection with their youth.
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Some of them ask about The Mummy, the franchise Fraser starred in from 1999 to 2008-would he consider doing another one? (Yes.) Some of them want to discuss obscure plot points from Doom Patrol, the superhero TV series Fraser acts in for HBO Max. And what he’s found is: People will line up to see him. Bracelet, $975, and ring, $595, by David Yurman.Įven now, during a year in which Fraser has, quite improbably, become an Oscar front-runner for his performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale-a performance that has reminded audiences of just how great Fraser once was, and how great he was once supposed to be-he is still showing up at conventions. Brendan Fraser is GQ's Comeback of the Year.
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