Brendan Fraser breaks down ‘The Mummy’ series
Brendan Fraser is experiencing a renaissance. Not only is his role in The Whale set to launch his star into the stratosphere once again, but a whole generation of adults are now introducing their children to his pulsating filmography, including roles as George of the Jungle, Bedazzled and, of course, his most impactful role in The Mummy franchise.
Now, in a recent interview with GQ, Fraser has taken another look back at that starring moment. It’s an era of Fraser’s career that is worth revisiting. In the 1990s he was a go-to Hollywood heartthrob, picking up lead roles with ease and competing against the likes of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, brandishing a sense of wit, charm and livability that few of his contemporaries could match.
No better was this package put together than in The Mummy. Released in 1999, the movie would become a box office smash, due in no small part to Fraser’s role as Rick O’Connell. He is an adventurer who travels to the City of the Dead with a librarian and her dim-witted brother, where they accidentally awaken the titular mummy, who just so happens to be a cursed high priest with some unwanted supernatural powers.
The film would eventually become a giant franchise, producing three different films. “It’s an action picture wrapped up in a comedy, in a romance and an adventure with a little bit of horror, and a thrill-a-minute kind of a rollercoaster popcorn movie,” Fraser explains of the triumphant series. The films were also packed with testing moments for Fraser and the cast, “It had a lot of prove-it shots in it. We rode our own camels, we wheeled our weapons, we fought one another. We ran around in the heat of the Desert od War Aza in Morocco. And all of that gave an authenticity to the movie that I think made it more globally appealing than if it had been, you know, shot in Arizona or New Mexico.”
That decision was down to the producer on set, James Jacks. “The late, great Jim Jacks was adamant about going to the place where Lawrence of Arabia was shot. I mean, the very place itself is an important character in the movie. It was thrilling. It had a little bit of, not danger per see, but some risk-taking to it also that felt like ‘what will happen today? Will we survive?’ Stephen Summers, one of his favourite directions that he would give was, he’d go, ‘Ready and don’t suck. Action!’ through a bullhorn. And we’d be like ‘ah’ and things would blow up and stuff would fall down, and then animals on fire. [Laughs] Then, ‘Okay, we got it, let’s do it again!’ Stephen just loves making movies. He loved his job, his enthusiasm is infectious. I loved making that movie.”
Of course, the success of the first picture would see a new one released only two years later. For Fraser, it was like reuniting with an old pal: “It was kinda like coming back to another semester [..] It was good to see everybody and to go back to Morocco too. We were like, ‘hey, there’s my favourite camel guy!’ It was just more of the same. People wanted more, so we gave them more of the same. More is more. lucky us, they responded.”
Perhaps one of the most notable moments of the second film was the introduction of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson into his first feature film. Acting as the Scorpion King, Fraser admitted he didn’t meet Johnson until after the premiere. He was “just a piece of tape” for the CGI effects. Those effects have been a consistent source of entertainment for any cinephile as they are, dare we say, hilariously bad. Fraser remembers meeting those who worked on the effects who admitted, “we needed a little more time.” However, Fraser thinks that “some of the charm of it is that when you watch it now, like it could get remastered, I guess, but it kind of wouldn’t be as fun if you didn’t see this sort of janky video carrying character of Dwayne going ‘rawwrrr’.”
By the time the third film came out in 2008, the charm of the first had begun to wane. Fraser is all too aware. “Okay, so first of all, look, it’s an action movie […] So it had a different spirit, a different character. Sadly, Rachel [Weisz] didn’t come back. It was its own film and set in Shanghai, in parts of China. it was a lot of fighting, a lot of fall down, go boom. It had been, up until that point, always playing every role that I had as kinetically as possible, as physically as possible, and as engaged in what the action of character was to get my meaning and my point across. What can I say? It caught up with me.”
The destructive nature of the shoot would plague Fraser, “I had a few injuries that became another injury. Like they said I was playing hurt, you know? So I would wrap up and tape up and, you know, you do the things you gotta do to get through with it, and we all do that, and I’m happy to, but it meant that I needed to start thinking about how to work smart instead of work hard. Around the time I made that movie it was a sort of fundamental shift in my approach. And now, when it comes to doing this s stuff, I just look at the young guys and go, ‘you’re gonna be great in this shot, man! Go kill it!'”
Asked if he would ever do a fourth instalment of the franchise, Fraser was quick with his assessment, “Absolutely. You got a script?” Watch the full interview below.
