The Brenaissance - the good, the bad and the questionable path to Oscar glory for The Whale’s Brendan Fraser

It’s been a bitter road for Brendan Fraser, fraught with being an internet meme during one of the hardest moments in his life through to appearing in a raft of poorly received Hollywood features. But the cream as they say always rises to the top, with The Whale’s lead actor reaching the pinnacle of Hollywood success with a Best Actor award at the Academy Awards.

It’s not been an easy road though, as Fraser himself would attest to; “I heard from college friends, people I hadn’t worked with or seen going back 30 years of my career,” he told GQ in 2018. “I was like, Oh, my God. Oh, f**k, what have I done now? And it was people saying they like me [...] I was like, Is this good, is this problematic? I don’t know. What did I do to earn this?”

Despite being a perennial favourite on the internet, with the Brenaissance picking up speed shortly before his casting in the DCEU series Doom Patrol, he still found it hard to pick up those hallowed movie roles despite being a box office success with The Mummy franchise in the early ‘00s and critically lauded for his roles in Gods and Monsters, Crash and The Quiet American. However, it would seem the adage in Hollywood, “don’t work with animals,” led to a drop in quality for the actor.

It makes those very public displays of gratitude even more genuine when you discover that he had injured himself several times performing stunts - literally, as he described it, as giving his entire body and well being for Hollywood, only to ultimately suffer from the consequences in later life. Then there is also the trauma he dealt with being sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, leading to his refusal to attend the Golden Globes.

PeopleWorld celebrates this landmark moment in the Brenaissance by looking at some of the best moments, some of the worst and some of the more questionable choices of roles for newly minted Academy Award winning actor - Brendan Fraser.

The Good

Doom Patrol 

We got vintage Brendan Fraser in the television series that many cite as the start of the road to recovery - the Starz DCEU show Doom Patrol, currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video (subscription required.) In it, we got to see the duality of Fraser’s acting abilities as a healthy dose of comic relief as Cliff Steele a.k.a Robotman.

But not content with providing laughs through his sheer exasperation at times due to his situation, we also saw the serious acting talents we’ve known Fraser to have all along, with his character also coming to terms with transgressions he undertook in his previous life coupled with the growing pains of adapting to his new body and revelations how he ended up in his new form.

In a piece also regarding the Brenaissance in Collider, they summed up our feelings about his role in Doom Patrol: “Brendan Fraser is able to do a lot of funny and outlandish things on Doom Patrol, but it’s in the show’s quiet moments that you can see why a character like Robotman would be so interesting for an actor to play. Cliff Steele, despite how much he wants to be, can never be a normal human being again.”

Metacritic Rating: 72/100

Gods and Monsters

Critically acclaimed upon its release in 1998, Bill Condon’s examination of Frankenstein director James Whale’s struggles with his 1931 film, coupled with keeping his homosexuality a secret in an era it was still considered taboo, was an awards darling. It was the exceptional performances of Sir Ian McKellan and Brendan Fraser, who played the object of Whale’s affections, that saw a return to the more serious roles Fraser started his career off with.

Fraser’s performance was summed up by The Independent Critic in 2020, stating that “a largely unrecognised but simply outstanding performance is turned in by Brendan Fraser as Clayton Boone.” While Sir Ian McKellan was nominated for an acting Oscar, sadly Fraser missed out.

Metacritic Rating: 74/100

School Ties

1992 saw Brendan Fraser thrust into the limelight with two roles; the first a buddy comedy alongside Goonies cast-member Sean Astin and a ever-popular Pauly Shore in the film Encino Man (known as California Man outside the US) which became a box office success upon its release, though perhaps not quite as gilded for his performance as his other 1992 role in School Ties.

Cast as David Greene, a working class Jewish teenager and astounding football quarterback, School Ties brought together a powerful collection of actors who would go on to find their own successes, including a pre-Good Will Hunting Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Though not as lauded critically as some of his later work, Fraser demonstrated in 1992 that he can swing back and forth from fun movie roles to more serious, dramatic roles.

Metacritic Rating: 65/100

The Bad

Furry Vengeance

It was a movie role that made Fraser rethink his entire acting career, he revealed during an Actor’s Roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. In particular, it was a scene involving his character Dan Sanders in a portaloo. “I was being mauled by a bear and 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 and it made me have a conversation with myself really quick about, "Is this worth it?" Maybe I should reprioritize myself and stop working with animals.”

“I stepped back for reasons that include that I had some chips and things in the paint and the business had changed a lot to the way that films were being made lost its wow factor because anything you can imagine and as you well know we saw from Everything Everywhere All At Once, if you could think it up it can be done, but I knew that it was time to hang on to the dream, but I had to grow back into it, get back to the real hunger that I had to tell stories, to have the time to think about it and come back and from a place of wanting to care about stories that I was going to make or you’d be lucky enough to be included became important to me again.”

Furry Vengeance was unanimously panned upon its release and many thought that it would be the film that would sink Fraser into acting obscurity. It’s odd also that he mentioned not working with animals once again…

Metacritic Rating: 27/100

The Nut Job

… as he would lend his voice to another critically reviled family film, The Nut Job in 2014. Though not working with animals, he would voice one alongside Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl and Liam Neeson.

Though critics had savaged the film with perhaps the most scathing criticism coming from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch citing The Nut Job was “some of the worst [public relations] for rodents since bubonic plague hit mediaeval Europe,” it was a box office success earning $130 million USD against its production cost of $30 million USD.

Fraser knew though that money isn’t everything and did not sign on to appear in the sequel - that was equally as panned as the original film.

Metacritic Rating: 37/100

The Questionable

Blast From The Past

We know that critically Blast From The Past isn’t one of Brendan Fraser’s more glittering works from his filmography, but there is a cult following regarding this 1999 comedy starring Alicia Silverstone and Christopher Walken. As Adam, Fraser played the hapless yet ever affable boy next door - or boy underground in this case - traversing a North American city with the ideals of the 1950’s.

It was a box office disappointment and received mixed reviews from critics, but fans of Brendan Fraser loved the butter-wouldn’t-melt character and his kindly attitude, something he is known for outside of his film roles, endearing despite some of the overwrought writing for the film. Though it’s got a low score on Metacritic, the user score is currently on 8.1 indicating “universal acclaim” among viewers.

Metacritic Rating: 48/100

Bedazzled

A remake of the popular Dudley Moore and Peter O’Toole film of the same name back in 1967, Bedazzled was also not a darling with the critics but did manage to fare well at the box office. The onscreen partnership also of Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley did have some chemistry, with Fraser playing the “aww shucks” good natured lead character opposite Hurley’s take on The Devil.

In a review for the Daily News in 2000, they wrote the film “has the good sense to star Brendan Fraser, who is shaping up as one of our finest romantic-comedy stars.” Little did we know that romcoms would not be Frasers forte - and neither, by his own admission, is working with animals.

Metacritic Rating: 49/100

Brendan Fraser’s Oscar winning role in The Whale can be viewed now through Amazon Video for £15.99.