omewhere in an anonymous Los Angeles  ware-house, scientists in starched white lab coats are working hard to develop a movie star for the new millennium. Security is tight at the Leading Man Project, but a few details have leaked out.  This new being will possess above-average looks and above-average chops.

It is precisely this misconception that most disturbs him. While we fortify ourselves with iced coffee before hitting the museum's galleries, I ask him point-blank whether his career could be summarized with the motto I Never Met a Loincloth I Didn't Like.   For a moment, Fraser fixes me with a stare that says, "People assume that I'm naive because of the roles I

Children and dogs will be helplessly in thrall to him.  And if all goes well, he will have a fail-safe mechanism that prevents him from wrecking his car, disappearing for several weeks and then checking into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center complaining of a "mysterious ailment."       Yet this new creation is not some replicant like Lara Croft, cobbled together with chips and bytes.  This tomb raider walks among us; he is flesh and bone, and I met him on a smog-free morning last spring in Los Angeles.  He is called the Fraser 2000 but answers to Brendan.

gravitate toward. I'm not a moron. Gods and Monsters showed the crowd who think I'm not capable of only serving up hamburger that there's more subtle cuisine available."  Perhaps. But this setting that the six-three, 189-pound actor suggested for our meeting strikes me as a cloying bit of spin control, as in: The Big Guy shows me his intellectual side. So, as we wander through an exhibition of Carleton Watkin's expeditionary photographs of the Old West, my cynicism gets the best of me and I pose a question guaranteed to trip him up.

And as he strode onto the veranda of the Getty Center, the sun warmed the museum's travertine marble walls until they looked as if they had been quarried from the same pit that gave the Florentines the hunk known as Michelangelo's David.

The Getty--with its synthesis of chiseled old-world stone and sleek twenty-first-century design--seemed like a telling backdrop for an encounter with the hunk best known as George of the Jungle.   After all, Brendan Fraser is what the men in the lab coats would call a hybrid, like an SUV with a race-car engine.  For the Fraser 2000 boasts the rugged good looks and versatility of an old studio-system star--the sort who might be told to swashbuckle on Monday and pratfall on Tuesday.  But as I soon learn, the 31-year-old leading man also has a bit of artiste under his hooded brow.  And it is this Inner Spacey that is forever amping him up to make art films and risky choices like playing Brick in an upcoming London stage production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.       As with any prototype, however, the shock of the new can be off-putting. Around Hollywood the mere mention of the Fraser brand name all too often prompts an arched eyebrow, a dismissive remark usually involving the word Velveeta and a nagging belief that he is a synthetic movie star--i.e., the beneficiary of (rather than the catalyst for) the box-office success of such by-the-numbers entertainments as The Mummy.

"Brendan, what's the difference between an albumen and a gelatin print?"       Silly reporter, tricks are for kids! Fraser effortlessly explains the difference between the two chemical processes and the way each alters the look of a photograph.  He does not stop there, however.  An avid photographer with a darkroom in his house and more than twenty cameras in his arsenal, he fives me a tutorial on the composition of the images before us.        It dawns on me that if I had spent a little less time staring down girls' sundresses in art-history class (and instead worked as a janitor to underwrite my undergraduate theater career as my museum buddy did), I too might be pulling down $12 million a picture, and living in the hills with a blonde wife whose name, Afton, evokes the Scottish river that Robbie Burns sang about.  But after talking to Fraser's colleagues, I learn that it was more than drive that got him in the door and through a fallow period in the mid-'90s, when big studio flops like Mrs. Winterbourne and forgettable art films like The Passion of Darkly Noon left his career totally cold.      How cold?  When he sent Sir Ian McKellen a mash note begging for a part in the Fascismo update of