Richard III, his future Gods and Monsters costar brushed him off.  McKellen has, of course, changed his tune and recently told me, "I now class [Fraser] with those other admirable young actors in Hollywood who want to developed their talent rather than earn more fame and a lot of money--Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and Ed Norton."      As we exit the gallery, Fraser is waylaid by a throng of kids who feel he is their own personal action toy.  He good-naturedly deals with the attention, particularly from the nervous, starstruck ones who forget their own names when he speaks to them.  As I watch him sign his autograph on their museum guides, I conduct my own thought experiment--I try to picture Depp, Penn, Downey or Norton smiling and signing their way out of this Rugby scrum of well-wishers who have pinned us down in the gift shop.  All that comes to mind, however, is that photo of Penn decking a paparazzo.  Ka-pow!  The difference between the dirty boys and the Fraser 2000 is significant.  Fraser has proved refreshingly immune to De Niro Disease, a form of career rot that addles the minds of many young actors, leading them to believe they should take only roles in which they look cool, tortured or psychotic.  Ever since the ascendance of De Niro and his antihero contemporaries, there has been a tendency among Hollywood insiders and moviegoers alike to devalue actors of the Joel McCrea--David Niven--Cary Grant school--those who in their performances say, Yes, I'm a movies star and I'm having fun.  Indeed, we fixate on the tortured, overgrown adolescents who mope through their roles and who are always reminding us, If you can't see my suffering, then where is the art, man?       Fraser, however, soldiers on, and in doing so he is laughing all the way to the bank--reaping the benefits of arriving on the scene during a drought in the comic-leading-man department, "Brendan is tall, dark, handsome and funny," says Elizabeth Hurley, Fraser's costar in his latest outing, Bedazzled.  "Apart from Hugh Grant and George Clooney, I can't think of anyone else who fits that mold."    Perhaps the key to Fraser's success in this genre is that he is not afraid to take risks and look foolish--be it dressed as a lesbian rival to Xena, the Warrior Princess, in a Saturday Night Live sketch or as the live-action incarnation of Jay Ward's cartoon characters. This knack for playing naifs, goofballs and outsiders is undoubtedly a result of his growing up as the youngest of four sons of a Canadian foreign-service officer and spending an itinerant childhood in Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, Canada, England, Holland and Washington State--all before the age of 17.  Even now he makes the first impression of the overly earnest transfer student with the tragic French blue jeans who joined your grad-school class mid-year: You like him, but there is something slightly different about his energy.

"He moved around a bit, and I always think smart people tend to be alienated from the world, which is a good posture for comedy," says Harold Ramis, who directed Bedazzled.  In this redo of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook's Faustian comedy, Fraser plays a technical-support geek who so desperately wants to be popular that he sells his soul to the Devil (Hurley) in exchange for seven wishes (the first of which he squanders on a Big Mac and fries). Ramis (whose comedy bona fides include coauthoring that Holy Trinity of Regular Guy Cinema--namely, Animal House, Stripes and Caddyshack) is quick to add, "Maybe that alienation allows him to identify with people who feel like outcasts or losers.  For a guy who is that physically powerful and attractive to play nerds the way he does, he must understand it on a deep psychological level."  Which is really just another way of saying that Fraser's ability to play the shy boy is tied in some deep way to who he really is. ad you been fortunate enough to catch Fraser's eight-grade performance as Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore, you would have witnessed the moment he first thought of becoming a professional actor.  This debut at the Sacred Heart parochial school in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, Washington, was less that auspicious, when he and I meet again a few weeks later in New York, He tells me the story: "I threw a cape in the air and it landed on my head, and I heard the audience doubling over with laughter. In the darkness of the cape, that fight-or-flee instinct kicked in. And I asked myself, 'Do I get on the bike and go home? Or do I continue?'"    The more Fraser performed, the more he felt something he had never known growing up: a sense of belonging to a community.  Looking back at a life on the move, Fraser recalls a childhood that is a cavalcade of images, from his Ottawa years, he conjures the mental snapshot of skating on the Rideau Canal.  From his time in the Dutch town of Wassenaar, he recalls a visit to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam.  The slide carousel finally slows down when we get to the high-school years--it was then that he was accepted at Upper Canada College, Toronto's prestigious boarding School.  Although he was happy to have some stability, it was here that Fraser encountered the major dilemma of his early life.       Studying alongside the children of Canada's elite was, he says, a time of "high highs and low lows" because "there was a lot of belittlement, but it was empowering [being away from home] because I could do what I wanted." Belittlement came not only in the usual forms, such as hazing, but also in the way that the theater club and acting were dismissed as frivolities.  Still, he loved his time amid the leafy quadrangles.  On the eve of his final year at UCC, however, his father left the government and took a job as an executive with Holland America Lines.  As a result, Fraser lost his tuition subsidy and had to drop out.