The director Brendan Fraser called a “Renaissance master”
The acting career of Brendan Fraser has arrived in three starkly different phrases. He came through in the 1990s with performances in Encino Man, School Ties and George of the Jungle, which culminated in him playing the lead role of Rick O’Connell in three movies in The Mummy film series.
After a few more acclaimed roles in the mid-2000s, Fraser’s career fell off a cliff, although it was impacted by alleged sexual misconduct occurring with him as the victim. In the past two years or so, Fraser has thankfully managed to pick his career back up to the heady heights he once knew, with roles in Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move and Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, the latter of which he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for.
Fraser is set to feature for one of the greatest directors of all time, Martin Scorsese, continuing his ascent to his former stardom. He will star alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in Scorsese’s next movie, The Killers of the Flower Moon, and recently expressed his excitement at being able to work with one of cinema’s all-time great filmmakers.
“I would jump at the opportunity to work with Martin Scorsese,” Fraser told Howard Stern, “Any actor would. He’s a master cinema creator, and to be in that environment for even like the three weeks that I worked and only being called in a handful of times – because that’s how he works – you really stand by it.”
“He hires top-shelf talent from all over the country,” he continued, “And the world for that matter, and everyone pretty much just waits until he says, ‘Okay, we want to do this and this,’ and you hop in the van, you go in and do it. That’s how it works, and that’s how I did it on this job.”
Stern then asked whether or not Scorsese decided to cast Fraser because he’d seen his excellent performance in The Whale, but Fraser insisted he hadn’t. “I’d already done The Whale,” the actor said. “He might have known about the project and considered it, but other than that, he’s just a regular actor’s director.”
Fraser explained that Scorsese would muck in with the rest of the cast and “move furniture around”. He added: “He likes to rehearse, he takes suggestions, and he always gives credit to the best idea, wherever it comes from,” he noted, “But he can like solve multiple problems at the same time and in an instant.”
The actor evidently feels indebted to being able to work on a Scorsese set, admitted, “It was just remarkable to feel like I was in the presence of a Renaissance master. He just instructed everyone on what to do, how to create the best piece of cinema he could. He still shoots on film, which is great.”
