Brendan Fraser could take home the Academy Award for Best Actor next month for his performance in The Whale, but he is already being celebrated as something of a comeback kid: this film marks a return to movies following years in the Hollywood wilderness after Fraser called out the industry for its permissive culture of sexual harassment.
As he enters what his many fans hope to be a successful new chapter in his career, Fraser has been looking back on some of his most famous film roles while doing press for The Whale. And in a recent interview with radio host Howard Stern, he went all the way back to the start of his career, and revealed that for a shower scene in the 1992 drama School Ties, he and his co-star Matt Damon were completely naked.
“It was scary. It’s scary to do that,” he said. “And when you’re an actor and you’re starting off, you’re ambitious and game for pretty much anything. They say, ‘Jump,’ and you say, ‘How high?'”
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The scene marks a highly charged moment in the film, when Damon’s character reveals to their teammates that Fraser’s character is Jewish, and a brawl breaks out in the showers.
“I appreciated that this isn’t really for wow or a scintillating factor of going, ‘Hey, look at that. Naked people,'” Fraser continued. “The point of it was is that when Damon’s character says what he says about David, he just reveals who he is… His anti-Semitism and his prejudice is stripped down naked, and it’s ugly.And the door is locked and they fight over it like shaved apes that need to be pulled apart because they’ve run out of things to say to one another, and it just turns into an ugly knuckle-dusting fit.”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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