Veteran actor Brendan Fraser has offered a deeply personal reflection on his decades-long career, describing acting as a daring leap: “You should feel a little bit of … calculated danger … that’s what acting is about.” His words come in a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair this week, as he revisits the early days of his rise to prominence and his enduring love for performance.
Fraser remembers the beginning of his blockbuster fame with The Mummy (1999), when the horror-adventure genre had a well-worn formula. “Audiences knew The Mummy to be an old guy wrapped in bandages … stumbling quietly … that was the perception of how that film should be made,” he recalled. But back when director Stephen Sommers pitched the movie, he had a bolder vision. “This is The Terminator Mummy — ain’t nothing stopping this,” Fraser said Sommers told him. The result was a high-octane, fun-driven adventure that defied expectations — and clearly struck a chord with audiences.
That risk paid off: the success of The Mummy along with its early sequels helped make Fraser a household name. But the actor admits that what made those films possible — and fun — was a willingness to embrace danger, uncertainty and even physical peril.
Fraser’s willingness to put himself on the line came at a heavy cost. He later revealed that during his earlier career — particularly when doing his own stunts on The Mummy and other action films — he endured serious physical strain. He has spoken candidly about the surgeries and long recovery time those years of “self-sacrifice” demanded. At one point, he admitted he had to assemble himself each morning like a “gladiator” just to make it through filming.
But his latest reflections make clear that tough as that chapter was, he doesn’t regret it. To him, acting — especially the kind of visceral, physical work that defined much of his early career — has always been about something more primal than comfort. It’s about courage. As he put it: “Being an actor, you have to have courage. Because without courage you can’t be brave. You can’t be brave unless you have an obstacle … something you fear … and the only way you’re gonna get through it, around it, over it, is with courage.”
