After being one of the most popular faces of the 90s, Brendan Fraser's shine was almost extinguished.
In the 90s, Brendan Fraser dominated Hollywood and the world. It took years for the reasons for this precipitous decline to come to light.
In 2018, Fraser gave an interview in which he began by saying that after having been an on-screen action-man for several years, he was forced to take a break due to the chronic pain he suffered from the stunts he had done in his movies.
“When I shot the third Mummy movie in China (in 2008), they put me in duct tape, screw-top ice packs, and mountain biking pads, because they're small and light and fit under your clothes. “I built an exoskeleton for myself every day,” he said at the time about the demands of his action sequences.
In the end, all of these injuries required multiple operations, ranging from partial knee replacement to interventions on the back and vocal cords. In total, Fraser says, he was in and out of hospitals for almost seven years.
And according to him, in 2003, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was a victim of abuse by Philip Berk, who was then listed as the president of the Hollywood Foreign Association, the entity that organizes the Golden Globes.
"His left hand surrounded me, grabbed me by the butt, and touched me with one of his fingers in the crotch," said the actor about the moment that Berk retold in his memoirs, but that he assured was a pinch in the spirit of the joke.
"Am I still scared? Absolutely. Do I feel like I have to say something? Of course. Have I wanted to do it many, many times? Of course. Have I stopped? Of course."
"I felt bad. I felt like a little child. I felt like I had a lump in my throat. "I thought I was going to cry."
At that time, GQ asked Philip Berk for a response, who denied everything in an email. “Mr Fraser's version is totally a fabrication,” he simply said.
Brendan wondered if that could be one of the reasons his career declined after his agents (without making the case public) asked for a written apology from the HFPA. “I don't know if this worked against me with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening,” he said in the interview.
The misfortunes accumulated from that moment on.
The death of his mother, his divorce from Afton Smith, and several bad project choices conspired against him so that little by little depression took him down and his brilliance faded.
Although popular belief dictates that the actor moved away from the spotlight and his profession, the truth is that he never stopped doing it, as he had sporadic roles in film and television, although none with great distinctions.
Now, as if it were a pending debt of destiny, Brendan Fraser has once again returned to the top of Hollywood at the hands of Darren Aronofsky, who chose him to be the protagonist of The Whale, his most recent film in which He plays an English teacher who, overcome by the pain of a loss, eats uncontrollably with the sole objective of mitigating the pain that overwhelms him.
Fraser, 53, shines once again and although he does so with a very different brilliance from that of the decade that ended the last millennium, he feels more resplendent than he did back then.
