“He’s not precious about the choices that he makes”: when Brendan Fraser disastrously channelled Steve Martin
There are an infinite number of worse places for an actor to draw inspiration from than Steve Martin when it comes to giving a comedic performance in a movie that requires just as much improvisation as it does imagination, so Brendan Fraser was at least on the right track, even if things couldn’t have turned out much worse.
Hollywood tends to throw up at least one major comedy star per decade who perfects a signature style of pratfalling that speaks to the widest possible audience and leads to a number of box office smash hits. The 1960s had Peter Sellers, the 1970s had Gene Wilder, the 1980s had Eddie Murphy, the 1990s had Jim Carrey, and the 2000s had Will Ferrell, with Martin straddling the divide between all of them.
The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains, Three Amigos, Roxanne, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Father of the Bride, and The Pink Panther gave the actor and comic a range of classics, cult favourites, and commercial goldmines that spanned from the ’70s to the mid-2000s, so he knew what the people wanted to see, and he knew how to give it to them.
When he sought to channel the spirit of Martin, Fraser was himself a major name flying high from the recent success of the blockbuster sequel The Mummy Returns and acclaimed drama The Quiet American. However, the wheels started to wobble when Looney Tunes: Back in Action hit cinemas in 2003, taking plenty of the shine off his star.
The live-action/CGI hybrid tanked in theatres and proved to be such a financial liability that Warner Bros not only shuttered all in-development projects featuring the Looney Tunes, but the company also mothballed its animated studio and kept the characters away from the big screen for almost two decades.
Ironically, Martin was part of the Back in Action cast playing the role of Mr Chairman and hamming it up for the cheap seats, giving Fraser first-hand exposure to the person he was inspired to base his performance on. Personally, it was a big moment for an actor who’d been a fan for years, but professionally, it was a disaster.
“Steve Martin is one of the great improvisers working today, and he brings to his character work a great deal of revving up,” Fraser explained to the BBC. “His process is to rehearse and know exactly what he’s doing, and he’s constantly honing and changing it. He’s not precious about the choices that he makes.”
Fraser decided to apply that approach to his own self-referential contributions as both protagonist DJ Drake and a cameo appearance as himself, and all he had to show for his efforts at the end of the day was a movie that failed so badly it banished the Looney Tunes from cinemas for nearly 20 years and killed an entire studio.
