‘The Whale’ Star Brendan Fraser Does This When He Sees Fans With Tattoos of His Face
Brendan Fraser might have just found his way back to the Hollywood spotlight. But that doesn’t mean his devoted fans left him. The actor rose to fame in films like George of the Jungle, Airheads with Adam Sandler, The Mummy franchise co-starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and School Ties with Matt Damon.
Fraser took a step back from the spotlight in the past decade, following stunt-related injuries and an incident in which he accused Hollywood Foreign Press Association President Philip Berk of sexual misconduct. (Berk continues to deny the claim.) Now, however, Fraser is being cast in myriad roles, several of which are genre shifts from the comedies for which he is best known.
Fraser is beloved by his original fan base regardless. And he continues to run into several of them with interesting tattoos immortalizing the actor. It happens so often, in fact, that Fraser now has a signature reaction.
Brendan Fraser has earned Oscar buzz for his role in ‘The Whale’
Fraser morphed from a one-genre comedy star in the ’90s and early 2000s into a multi-dimensional actor. He’s taken on projects like No Sudden Move on HBO Max and a stint on Showtime’s The Affair. It is his starring role as an obese English teacher named Charlie in The Whale, however, that has garnered the most recent attention.
The movie was released at the end of 2022 and is already garnering a fair amount of Oscar buzz. Fraser is a favorite for Best Actor, though he feigns nonchalance when he’s asked about it. During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Kimmel asks if Fraser is aware he’s an Oscar favorite for the role. Fraser points to himself in a self-deprecating manner and says, “If you say so, Jimmy.” He paused, then added, “I’m aware that The Whale could bring us to the finish line and I’m excited for that prospect.”
Fraser wore up to 300 pounds of prosthetics in The Whale. These took hours to get on and gave him vertigo when he shed the extra weight after filming each day. In the film, Charlie is in poor health and homebound; attempting to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink). Despite this, Fraser told Kimmel his character is an optimist whose superpower is to “see the good in others and to bring that out in them.”
Brendan Fraser compares conventions like Comic-Con to ‘speed dating’
Though it had been several years since Fraser made the press junket rounds to promote big projects, he’s continued to enjoy attending conventions and festivals to interact with fans. “I really enjoy meeting with everybody who put me where I am. It’s fun, you sit at a desk and you meet people,” Fraser told Kimmel, miming signing autographs. “It’s sort of like speed dating, in a way.”
Fraser compared those appearances to taking a “victory lap,” with fans coming up one after another to compliment his work. However, he joked that the interactions can sometimes be “unsettling.” An example? When fans show him the tattoos they’ve gotten of his face. One fan posted an example of Fraser’s portrait on their forearm on Reddit, and apparently, Fraser has seen his share of his face on other people’s bodies. “Normally I put a mustache on it,” he told Kimmel.
“So you’ve seen so many tattoos of your own face on people’s bodies that you now have a thing you do when you see them?” Kimmel asked. “Yea,” Fraser said, to audience laughter. “If I sign my name then they’ll just go get that tattooed also, and that’s just a little weird. That costs extra,” he joked.
Brendan Fraser’s upcoming projects include Martin Scorcese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Regardless of how The Whale does this awards season, Fraser has proven he’s back and taking on other serious projects. He doesn’t consider it a comeback, but all the same, he’s returned to making headlines on his own.
According to IMDb, Fraser has three roles currently in post-production. Brothers is a comedy starring Fraser, Josh Brolin, and Peter Dinklage, though no synopsis is available yet. He’ll also lead Behind the Curtain of Night, a sci-fi drama. But perhaps his most notable project yet to come is his role in Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio with Robert De Niro. The film tells of an investigation by the FBI into the murders of the Osage tribe, which involves J. Edgar Hoover. The film is expected in May 2023.
