“I had so much admiration”: Brendan Fraser owes his career to Matt Damon
As unlikely premises for exciting films go, predicting the weather has to rank pretty low down on the list. Any movie that essentially has something as perfunctory at its core, something you can do by quickly checking an iPhone app, has to be a stretch, but it seems Pressure with Brendan Fraser has actually gone down a… excuse the pun, storm.
Maybe it’s because they didn’t have iPhones in the 1940s, maybe it’s because the film is set in the UK where we absolutely love the weather and will talk about it endlessly, but Pressure, which opened in the US at the end of May but won’t appear here until September, has already got a buzz going and most of the noise has been about how good the performances, including Fraser’s, are.
If you don’t know the background of the film, it essentially revolves around the D-Day landings in 1944, or rather the three days leading up to the event, in which General Eisenhower (played by Fraser) demands a British meteorologist (Andrew Scott) tell him whether or not thousands of Allied troops can land on the beaches at Normandy, or if a gathering storm would make it a suicide mission.
We’ll see in September if UK audiences will take to it as well as the Americans have, and it will also be a pointer on how much of a draw Fraser is here, where, aside from The Mummy movies way back in the late 1990s and his career revival-sparking Oscar winner The Whale, he hasn’t really had many big movies.
In the US, though, he was an undoubted ‘90s heartthrob and kid comedy icon thanks to Disney’s George of the Jungle and the fantasy sci-fi Encino Man, which came out in 1992, the same year he was thrust together with a young, pre-fame Matt Damon on a film that proved to be the making of him. It was called School Ties, and it was a drama that also featured Ben Affleck and Chris O’Donnell, who would get a Golden Globe nomination that year for Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman, and later starred in Batman Forever.
Fraser, who was 23 at the time of filming, credits Damon with getting him through the audition to land the part of lead role David Greene in the movie, which told the tale of a Jewish high school quarterback who gets a scholarship to an elite prep school, only to end up being bullied and insulted due to his background.
Fraser recalled the process of being given the part to Entertainment Weekly, saying, “I was appointed to meet with (producer) Sherry (Lancing) after doing a reading. I was wearing an awful shirt by today’s standards. I read with Matt Damon. I got the job because of Matt.”
Adding, “I believed everything that came out of his mouth. I remember having this moment of thinking, ‘Just match [his] pitch. Don’t put curlicues on this. Don’t swing for the fences.’ I felt great after that. I had so much admiration for him.”
Damon had begun that year of 1992 still at Harvard University, dropping out a few months later to take acting roles, including School Ties and Geronimo: An American Legend, but not before he had begun the creative writing essay that five years later would become a film starring himself, Affleck and Robin Williams – Good Will Hunting.
Although School Ties lost money at the box office, Fraser went on to make 1994’s With Honors opposite Joe Pesci, and then broke through with 1997’s George of the Jungle, which led to his headline role in three Mummy movies, grossing over $1.2billion. A fourth film, reuniting Fraser and Rachel Weisz, is expected in October 2027.
