The movie that made Brendan Fraser question his acting career
The first Canadian to ever win an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, the remarkable comeback of Brendan Fraser was completed in spectacular fashion when he secured the most prestigious prize the industry has to offer, capping off a resurgence welcomed with open arms by everybody.
He’d always been a popular star and a shining beacon of wholesome positivity, but choice parts in high-profile projects were hard to come by for a long time, with Fraser experiencing the double-edged sword of stardom during a career that experienced dizzying highs and crushing lows.
A string of flops in the 2000s slowed his momentum to a crawl, and even though he’d had plenty of experience working with animals in movies that weren’t abjectly terrible, he ended up questioning everything he knew about his chosen profession after working with a collection of critters in a film that was indisputably awful.
Roger Kumble’s Furry Vengeance had Fraser take top billing as property developer Dan Sanders, who oversees the construction of an environmentally-friendly housing development deep in the woods of Oregon. Trying to have his city-dwelling family adjust to rural life presents one obstacle, but things take a turn for the torturous when the local animals discover he’s responsible for the destruction of their habitat, setting out to make his life a misery.
A box office flop and a critical catastrophe, the leading man conceded during a roundtable conversation with The Hollywood Reporter that one scene in particular left him at an existential crossroads, where he was “shooting a scene wherein I was being mauled by a bear.”
“I was in a porta-potty, and the porta-potty got inverted, and I was on my head, and all this Gatorade and stuff dropped on my head,” he said. “That made me have a conversation with myself really quick about: ‘Is this worth it? Maybe I should reprioritise myself and stop working with animals.’” Unfortunately for non-human performers, Fraser made a decision to stick to his guns.
That does make it a little ironic that he won an Oscar for The Whale, which is, of course, an animal, but having collaborated with mammals and reptiles alike across the course of The Mummy franchise, George of the Jungle, Dudley Do-Right, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action among others, he was well within his rights to take some time off and focus his energies exclusively on scene partners who are human beings.
It worked a treat, with the resurgent star most recently appearing in another awards season favourite when he descended on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon to leave barely a shred of scenery undigested. For any agents considering having a script make its way across his desk, the easiest way to ensure it gets read is a complete and total absence of any members of the animal kingdom.
