How Brendan Fraser Made It All the Way Back

When GQ last met him, Brendan Fraser was speaking candidly for the first time about his supposed disappearance from Hollywood. Now, four years later, he's an Oscar favorite and a man reckoning in real life with the kind of comeback you only see in the movies.

- By Zach Baron. Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath

For the past few years, Brendan Fraser has been attending fan conventions. Maybe a star with a different level of vanity or self-regard wouldn't talk about this fact because it could be seen as embarrassing, or humbling, but Fraser is not that star. He shows up, shakes hands, signs autographs, talks about the past. Shares table space with guys like Sean Astin, from The Lord of the Rings and The Goonies. Fraser started doing this, he told me, "to get over myself. Because I thought either, It's not something I would do, or, I didn't want to put myself in a place where I was vulnerable in front of everyone." But then he went to a Comic Con in London. This was in 2019. Part of it, he admits, is that he was getting paid; part of it was that after a rough decade, he suddenly felt the desire to get back out there. "I wanted to see the people," Fraser said.

Even now, during a year in which Fraser has, quite improbably, become an Oscar front-runner for his performance in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale-a performance that has reminded audiences of just how great Fraser once was, and how great he was once supposed to be-he is still showing up at conventions. And what he's found is: People will line up to see him. Some of them ask about The Mummy, the franchise Fraser starred in from 1999 to 2008would he consider doing another one? (Yes.) Some of them want to discuss obscure plot points from Doom Patrol, the superhero TV series Fraser acts in for HBO Max. Some come because they see in Fraser-an actor who was a fixture of the biggest movies of the 1990s and early 2000s, the star of School Ties and Encino Man and Looney Tunes: Back in Action-some ineffable connection with their youth. "In their words," he told me, "they say I was their childhood."