Brendan Fraser’s favourite Stanley Kubrick movie
We all love a good comeback story, and Hollywood is full of them – Matthew McConaughey, Michael Keaton and Ke Huy Quan are just some of the actors who’ve enjoyed remarkable resurgences in the past decade. Nonetheless, perhaps the most heart-warming comeback story of recent times has been that of Brendan Fraser.
A simply delightful Hollywood star both on and off-screen, Fraser was everywhere in the 2000s. The actor was an important part of many childhoods thanks to his roles in films like The Mummy Trilogy and George of the Jungle, and he was an underrated dramatic actor. He didn’t take on more serious roles often, but whenever he did, such as in 1998’s Gods and Monsters, Fraser proved he had ample range.
Fraser largely disappeared during the 2010s, however, and he later opened up on why. He suffered various health problems brought on by his frequent stunt work, and this, combined with a battle with depression brought on by the breakdown of his marriage and the death of his mother, is what Fraser believes caused his career to decline. He was also allegedly sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which understandably caused significant distress.
Still, throughout the late 2010s, Fraser slowly but surely returned to screens with various well-received character roles in shows such as The Affair, Trust and Titans before he made his big-screen comeback in director Darren Aronofsky’s most recent film, The Whale. Over a decade after Aronofsky directed The Wrestler, the comeback vehicle for the great Mickey Rourke, Aronofsky cast Fraser in his project. For his magnificent turn as a morbidly obese man in his final days, Fraser won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
It was a truly wonderful moment, and hopefully, unlike Rourke’s comeback, Fraser’s return to stardom will continue.
Fraser’s journey has been a fascinating one, and when he sat down with A.Frame to detail ten movies that have shaped his life, this eclectic list fittingly echoed Fraser’s career in specific ways. His filmography has swung between delightful, heart-warming blockbuster roles and skilled dramatic turns and sure enough, his list offers an interesting mix of crowd-pleasing classics and darker, more serious works.
One of the ones that falls into the latter category is Fraser’s favourite Stanley Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon. Discussing the movie, Fraser states: “I loved Barry Lyndon because I heard that Kubrick created lenses so that they could leave the aperture open wide enough to capture candlelight, which I thought was very cool. It really felt like, ‘Wow, I guess we’re going to go back in time to see what it’s like in the Gilded Age!’ I loved that.”
If nothing else, it is great to see Barry Lyndon highlighted instead of the more common picks for lists like these, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Shining. Barry Lyndon has always been perhaps Kubrick’s most underrated masterwork, and alongside its revolutionary cinematography – thanks to which pretty much every shot in the film genuinely looks like a painting – it also has perhaps the most emotionally devastating story in Kubrick’s oeuvre.
