‘I had something to say, too’

Brendan Fraser is poised for a profession comeback — and doubtlessly an Oscar — together with his return to the large display in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. In a brand new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the actor opens up about what made him step again from Hollywood within the first place.

Speaking to CBS’s Lee Cowan, Fraser displays on his main man standing all through the ’90s and 2000s thanks to roles in movies like Encino Man, School Ties, George of the Jungle and, most notably, the blockbuster Mummy franchise.

“I think, that guy’s really lucky,” the 54-year-old says now of his youthful self, including with fun, “I think he’s got awesome hair.”

Fraser was a Hollywood heartthrob on the time, however says now that he felt like he did not fairly measure up.

“I felt at that time that it wasn’t enough,” he says. “I wasn’t big enough, I wasn’t cut enough, or any of those adjectives. And the person that I saw, and was trying to create, wasn’t an ideal in my mind. And how do you contend with that?”

Fraser says he “needed the music to stop” — which meant stepping again from Hollywood.

“We can put actors on pedestals and then knock them off so quickly and so easily,” he says. “It’s almost like that’s the game. So I just got rid of the pedestal. I just wanted to be myself.”

But it wasn’t simply self-doubt that prompted Fraser’s hiatus. In 2018, the divorced dad of three went public a few 2003 groping incident involving Philip Berk, the previous Hollywood Foreign Press Association president. Though Berk has maintained that he merely pinched the actor’s backside as a joke, Fraser has described the touching as extra invasive. (“His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around,” he advised GQ in 2018.)

“It was causing me emotional distress,” he says of the incident. “It was causing me personal distress.”

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He tells Cowan that up till that time, he had “played by the rules” with regard to Hollywood’s energy dynamics. What occurred with Berk was a wake-up name — and a line within the sand.

“I felt like OK, now, suddenly, I’ve been violated and it has gone too far,” he says. “And I will no longer abide this.”

Fraser credit the #MeToo motion with giving him the braveness to share his story.

“I spoke up because I saw so many of my friends and colleagues who at that time were bravely emerging to speak their truth power,” Fraser tells Cowan. “And I had something to say, too.”