“The studio was too cheap to hire me”: the role Brendan Fraser refused to play twice
The world of ancient curses and thousands of bugs flying out of pyramids is about to get much more complicated to follow once Lee Cronin’s The Mummy hits the cinema later this year.
Anyone cheerfully heading into it, clutching popcorn, expecting an action-adventure along the lines of the 1999 movie starring Brendan Fraser, is going to be in for a very rude awakening indeed.
That’s because Cronin is one of the particularly twisted minds behind the vomit-inducingly grim recent Evil Dead movies, and so has decided to take The Mummy in a much more ‘Jesus Christ what the hell was that, I’m going back behind the sofa’ direction than the long-haired, bare chested swashbuckling that was on display from Fraser at the end of the last century.
Back then, he was the archetypal action hero, all cracking whips and dragging fair maidens like Rachel Weisz around sand-swept countries, and indeed the pair are in line to return to their roles as Rick and Evelyn O’Connell in 2028, as a much less horror-y reboot of the series is in the works which is likely to ignore the third movie and pick up where 2001’s The Mummy Returns left off.
Fraser had got the gig in The Mummy thanks to his work on the 1997 Disney comedy George of the Jungle, the family film based on a late ‘60s animated TV series about a man raised by animals who finds himself in a big city and in love with a wealthy heiress. Co-starring the likes of This is 40’s Leslie Mann and John Cleese, it was one of Disney’s most successful live-action movies of the era, bringing in almost $200million against a budget of just $50m and igniting Fraser’s career after a series of flops.
Although the film received fairly underwhelming reviews from critics, Fraser’s slapstick turn in the lead role was praised and his six years of making movies without a breakthrough hit paid off, landing him a part opposite Ian McKellen in the hugely acclaimed Gods and Monsters the following year, a period drama that couldn’t have been much more removed from the vine swinging that brought him success.
It was that versatility that the actor showed while he was in the midst of his fame with The Mummy franchise a few years later, as Disney came calling once more to make George of the Jungle 2. Fraser recalled to Entertainment Weekly, “I think George got a remake, and they built a joke into it that the studio was too cheap to hire me, which wasn’t inaccurate”.
He added, “I was approached. I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, but I felt like I wanted to go do The Quiet American instead with Michael Caine…I’m always making diverse choices, and, hopefully, that keeps me and an audience interested. With a bit of distance, I think they’ve all cumulatively led up to the place I’m in now.”
Not having Fraser return as George proved to be a nail in the coffin of the 2003 sequel, and it ended up going straight to video despite many of the supporting cast from the original signing up again. The Quiet American, meanwhile, received positive reviews and an Oscar nomination for Caine, but struggled at the box office due to audiences feeling it was unpatriotic in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
