I think I bruised a rib, but I was like: That's okay! I'll take it. And I got my Screen Actors Guild card and an extra 50 bucks for the stunt adjustment, ’cause they threw me into a pinball machine. “They gave me a sailor outfit, along with some other guys, and we did a punch-up scene with some Marines. Fraser's first acting job was in a 1991 film called Dogfight, starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. He starts, uncharacteristically, at the beginning. “Chillax, maybe?”Īnd so these synthetic flutes end up being the soundtrack to Fraser's story. “I thought this would be chill,” he says when he returns.
He disappears for a moment, and then suddenly the sound of synthesizers comes from the speakers overhead, followed by a Pandora ad. “But they're here all the time,” Fraser says. His sons live with his former wife, Afton, in Greenwich, Connecticut, just across the state line from Bedford. “I love forests and the seasons and…burning wood,” he says.
Inside, his house is dark wood, open, with windows that look out onto his backyard-hammock, soccer goal, trampoline, tetherball, zip line, swimming pool. “Can you just grab those hatchets?” he asks. As he parks his car, he begins removing items from it: a black leather satchel, a riding helmet, a hunting bow. He was there on the poster, year after year, and then he wasn't, and it took him turning up in a supporting part in the third season of a premium-cable show, The Affair, for many of us to even realize that he'd been gone.įraser lives down a dirt road, in a tall, angular house with a wide lawn that descends to a glittering lake. And though his run as a leading man in studio films lasted to the end of this past decade, he's been missing, or at least somewhere off in the margins, for some time now.
If you watched movies at the end of the previous century, you watched Brendan Fraser. He was in Encino Man and School Ties in 1992, Airheads in 1994, George of the Jungle in 1997, The Mummy in 1999. I'm 35: There was a time when the sight of Fraser was as familiar to me as the furniture in my parents' house. Blue-gray stubble around the once mighty chin, gray long-sleeve shirt draped indifferently over the once mighty body. His eyes are pale and a bit watery these days-less wide than they used to be when he was new to the screen, playing guys who were often new to the world. You wander in and then emerge, hours or days later, disoriented but appreciative that something so unpredictable can still exist in this world. He can't help but digress-“Instead of telling you what time it is, I might give you the history of horology,” he says, in the middle of saying something else. But that is the way it is, I'm learning, with Brendan Fraser. Why he does this is a question with a few different, surprising answers.
And though he's been traveling for most of this past year, going back and forth between Toronto, where he was shooting a series based on Three Days of the Condor called Condor, and Europe, where he was shooting Trust, an FX series about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III produced by Danny Boyle, he makes sure to stop in and visit Pecas every few weeks or so. Fraser lives nearby and owns property that overlooks this farm, about an hour north of Manhattan. “Without doing too much-what's the word? Anthropomorphic…anthropomorphizing… Without pretending that the animal is a human, he looked like he needed help. They were filming down in Mexico, he says, when he and the horse had a shared moment of recognition. Fraser played a mid-19th-century Texas Ranger. Fraser met him on the set of a 2015 History Channel series, Texas Rising. The horse's name is Pecas-the Spanish word for freckles. He removes a green bandanna from his pocket and gently wipes the animal's eyes. “I got this horse because it's a big horse,” he says, standing in a barn in Bedford, New York. Brendan Fraser wants me to meet his horse.