Brendan Fraser

1968-present

Brendan Fraser Now: Actor Will Star in a New Movie Called Rental Family

After his short but memorable appearance in the Martin Scorsese crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon, Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser is taking on a more comedic role for his next project. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor—who is set to turn 55 on December 3—will star in the comedy-drama Rental Family from Searchlight Pictures. Fraser will play a down-and-out actor living in Tokyo who is hired by a Japanese rental family company.

The movie is directed by Hikari, who also helmed the popular Netflix series Beef starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong. There is no release date for Rental Family yet, and principal photography is expected to begin next spring in Japan.

Canadian-American actor Brendan Fraser is known for his appearances in movies like The Mummy trilogy, George of the Jungle, and The Whale, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2023. He is the first Canadian to receive the honor. The Oscar win completed a triumphant return to prominence for Fraser after his number of leading roles slowed in the mid-to-late 2000s. The hiatus was partially on account of a number of health problems, but the actor has also cited personal matters, including a sexual assault he says he experienced in 2003.

FULL NAME: Brendan James Fraser
BORN: December 3, 1968
BIRTHPLACE: Indianapolis, Indiana
SPOUSE: Afton Smith (1998-2009)
CHILDREN: Griffin, Holden, and Leland
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Sagittarius

Brendan James Fraser was born on December 3, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Canadian parents Peter and Carol Mary Fraser. Brendan is the youngest of four siblings, including brothers Kevin, Regan, and Sean. He holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada. Prior to his own stardom, Brendan’s claim to fame was his maternal uncle George Genereux, who won a gold medal in trap shooting at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, and was later inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.

Peter is a former journalist who moved to the United States to work as a foreign service officer for Canada’s Government Office of Tourism. Because of his position, the family relocated every few years and spent time in multiple countries. These international travels influenced young Brendan in multiple ways. He learned to speak French while living in Ottawa, Ontario, and picked up Dutch in The Hague, Netherlands. Attending theater shows in London as a child from ages 6 through 8 first sparked his interest in acting. He would later study it in school.

Fraser’s early education included stops at a Montessori school in Detroit and the Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington. Brendan graduated from Upper Canada College, an all-boys preparatory boarding school in Toronto, Ontario, in 1987 and then studied at the Actors’ Conservatory at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.

In January 1991, Fraser borrowed his mother’s car and drove from Seattle to Hollywood with hopes of making it big as an actor.

Sean Astin, Brendan Fraser, and Pauly Shore starred in Encino Man (1992).

Fraser quickly earned his first Hollywood role with a small part as a sailor in the 1991 film Dogfight, starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. His breakthrough came a year later with a starring role in the 1992 comedy film Encino Man. Fraser played a frozen caveman named Link, who is thawed out by two high school friends and must adjust to life in modern day Los Angeles.

Fraser said he drew inspiration from some of his acting heroes like Buster Keaton and Bill Irwin for his deadpan performance. “I was pretty wide-eyed about being in this big Hollywood comedy at the time that was produced by Disney,” Fraser told Syfy in 2022. “I guess I really just had to show up to work and feel like, ‘Wow—what is going on around me?!’ And that’s what Link was doing all the time.” The film was moderately successful, grossing more than $40 million, but has since become a cult classic.

Also in 1992, Fraser had the starring role in the coming-of-age drama School Ties alongside rising actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O’Donnell. Over the next four years, he appeared in films such as Twenty Bucks (1993), With Honors (1994), Airheads (1994), The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995), and The Twilight of the Golds (1996) before his career really began to take off.

Fraser’s first major box office hit was the 1997 Disney movie George of the Jungle, in which he played a man raised in the jungle by animals in a clear spoof of the Tarzan story. The film grossed more than $174 million and led to a direct-to-video sequel in 2003.

Fraser, who spent much of the film wearing nothing more than a loincloth, revealed in a 2022 interview with Adam Sandler that he starved himself to build and maintain the character’s muscular physique. “I was waxed. Starved of carbohydrates,” he said. “I would drive home after work and stop to get something to eat. I needed some cash one day, and I went to the ATM, and I couldn’t remember my PIN number because my brain was misfiring. Banging on the thing. I didn’t eat that night.”

Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz portray explorer Rick O’Connell and his wife, Evelyn, in the 1999 film The Mummy.

The actor began to pick up more frequent leading parts, such as in 1998’s Gods and Monsters and the 1999 live-action movie adaptation of the Dudley Do-Right cartoon series. Also in 1999, he played his most recognizable role to date, as adventurer Rick O’Connell in the first film of The Mummy action trilogy.

Fraser felt obligated to do his own stunts because of his large salary for The Mummy and revealed in 2023 he nearly died on set while performing a hanging scene. “ [The stunt coordinator] was pulling up, and I was going down, and the next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, there was gravel in my teeth, and everyone was really quiet,” he recalled on The Kelly Clarkson Show. But Fraser’s dedication paid off, as the movie spawned two sequels—The Mummy Returns in 2001 and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in 2008—and the trilogy collectively grossed more than $1.4 billion.

Fraser also showed off his acting prowess in other genres around this time. He starred with Elizabeth Hurley in the 2000 comedy film Bedazzled, then alongside Looney Tunes characters in the 2003 live action-cartoon hybrid Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and in the 2004 ensemble movie Crash. He also performed in London’s Lyric Theatre run of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starting in 2001.

Although Fraser continued to work in movies over the next decade, his roles greatly diminished in stature. One contributing factor was his poor physical health. Years of doing stunts had taken their toll on the 6-foot-3 actor. He told GQ in 2018 that he underwent two surgeries to ease pressure on his spinal cord, a partial knee replacement, and even surgery to repair his vocal cords. Fraser estimated he was in and out of the hospital for a period of seven years.

He also struggled with his mental health, becoming depressed after he says he experienced a sexual assault during a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003. In that same 2018 interview with GQ, the actor says the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Philip Berk, groped his buttocks and genitals and that he had to forcibly remove his hand. “I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I felt like I was going to cry,” Fraser said in his first public comments about the incident, adding that he was afraid to speak out prior to the interview out of fear it might harm his career.

Berk had written about the incident years prior in his 2014 book With Signs and Wonders and insisted he had only pinched Fraser’s buttocks in jest. He also sent Fraser an apology letter but claimed no wrongdoing. He responded to the GQ interview by calling Fraser’s recollection of events a “total fabrication.”

Fraser said he became reclusive after the incident and began to wonder if the HFPA had blacklisted him. These events, in addition to his highly publicized divorce from actor Afton Smith and the death of his mother in 2016, helped drive Fraser out of the spotlight.

Brendan Fraser holds up his Academy Award for Best Actor, which he won for the 2022 film The Whale.

Following some of his high-profile film flops like Furry Vengeance (2010) and Extraordinary Measures (2010), Fraser began his “Brenaissance” on the small screen. He appeared on six episodes of the Showtime drama The Affair in 2016 and ’17 and played Fletcher Chace in the FX series Trust in 2018. He also played Cliff “Robotman” Steele across four seasons of the Max superhero series Doom Patrol, from 2019 through 2023.

But the leading role that truly solidified Fraser’s comeback was in the 2022 drama movie The Whale, based on a 2012 play by Samuel D. Hunter and directed by Academy Award–nominee Darren Aronofsky. Fraser played a morbidly obese English teacher named Charlie who attempts to reconnect with his daughter.

Aronofsky had been trying to make the film for years but couldn’t find the right actor. “I considered everyone—all different types of actors, every single movie star on the planet—but none of it really ever clicked,” he said. But after watching a trailer for the 2006 film Journey to the End of the Night, in which Fraser starred, he wanted to meet with the actor. Aronofsky knew Fraser was right for the part after he read just a couple of lines of the script.

Fraser wore a 200-pound prosthetic suit to fill out Charlie’s 600-pound frame that required the assistance of five people to put on. His entire makeup process took about five to six hours each day at the start of production, though that was eventually cut in half. Although the film was polarizing—with some critics saying it perpetuated fatphobic stereotypes—Fraser’s performance was generally praised. He received an extended standing ovation after The Whale showed at the 2022 London Film Festival.

Fraser was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama Motion Picture but lost to Austin Butler for his portrayal of Elvis Presley. However, Fraser triumphed at the Academy Awards, becoming the first Canadian to receive the Oscar for Best Actor.

Off the success of The Whale, Fraser appeared in the October 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the true story of a series of murders on the Osage Nation Reservation during the 1920s. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone, with Fraser portraying a lawyer. Elsewhere, Fraser filmed a comedy film called Brothers with a release date to be announced and also signed onto the comedy-drama Rental Family, which is expected to begin production in spring 2024.

Brendan Fraser attended the 2023 Academy Awards with his girlfriend, Jeanne Moore, and two of his sons Holden and Leland.

Fraser met Afton Smith, an actor from Long Island, New York, through mutual acquaintance Winona Ryder at a Fourth of July party in 1993. They both appeared in George of the Jungle in 1997, and the couple married a year later in September 1998. The couple has three sons: Griffin, born in September 2002; Holden, born in August 2004; and Leland, born in May 2006.

Griffin was diagnosed with autism when he was around 2 years old, and Fraser admitted in a February 2023 radio interview with Howard Stern he wasn’t sure how to handle it. “The first reaction that I had was, ‘I want to know how to fix this. What’s the cure? What does this mean?’” he explained. “Then, you learn quickly that, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Fraser has since become an advocate for individuals with autism and their families, making an effort to reach out to them at public events.

In 2007, Fraser and Smith announced they planned to divorce, and it was finalized two years later. As part of their settlement, Fraser was required to pay $900,000 per year in alimony and child support. Four years later, he petitioned a court to reduce the payments and claimed his expenses were more than his declining income. Smith responded by accusing him of “fraud” and hiding movie contracts totaling $9 million at the time of their divorce. If a change was granted, it was never made public. Fraser’s spousal support payments eventually ended in 2019.

Currently, Fraser is dating Jeanne Moore, a movie and TV hair and makeup artist. They went public with their relationship in September 2022 when they first appeared together at the Venice Film Festival. She also attended the 2023 Oscars ceremony, with Fraser referencing her—and his sons—during his acceptance speech.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Fraser’s net worth is estimated around $20 million as of July 2023. A reported $12 million salary for The Whale helped the actor build up his account after his divorce and alimony dispute.

• I was really out of the gate early. Sometimes, like in competition on opening weekends with my own project. I was also kind of on a merry-go-round. I wanted the music to stop. It can get to be a bit much.
• I know that I’m proud of the work that I did, and it’s enough. It’ll live on long after me. And that’s good. The other stuff, maybe not so much. That’ll live on, too, but… I think I just have to live for what’s happening for me now.
• My hope is that I can be recognized for my professional efforts, rather than the trope of the comeback kid… being written off and then coming back.
• Back then, [acting] was life and death. Those are the stakes of a young person’s ambition. But at the moment, I feel like I got nothing to prove.

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Tyler Piccotti

News and Culture Editor, Biography.com

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.