| "It was a hit in the nose. I was looking forward to spending the last year there before I entered real life. I was depressed," he says, thinking back to his old dorm room with the Echo and the Bunnymen poster. "But I sucked it up and made the decision that I was postponing, which was to go train as an actor." | Indeed, Fraser was coming off a strong debut year in movieland thanks to the disparate salvos of being Pauly Shore's straight dude in Encino Man and then having the lead in School Ties, a period drama about anti-Semitism at a New England boarding school. As with Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, the film's cast - which included |
 A few days before Labor Day weekend, the 17-year-old Fraser auditioned his way into Cornish College of the Arts, a small school in Seattle. At Cornish, movie acting was considered decadent, and Fraser began training for a life in the theater. He stared in a student production of Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo and threw himself into work--at the expense of socializing. "He's never been a joiner. He's always been someone who was a bit of an outsider" is how Hal Ryder, a professor at Cornish describes his prize pupil when I reach him on the phone. "Brendan sometimes feels like he's separate. He connects on a one-to-one level. At his wedding, where he had lots of good friends, he found the time to sit with me twice for ten to twenty minutes and just talk. I think there is something about those [outsider] roles that is true to him." After graduation Fraser interned at a local theater company for a year, until he was cast in Dogfight, director Nancy Savoca's 1991 look back at a bunch of Vietnam-bound marines who have a contest to see who can bag the ugliest girl on the eve of shipping out. (his first on-screen line is a gem: "How would ya like to eat my shit?") Although Fraser worked only for a day during the Seattle shoot, the experience of meeting the movie's start, River Phoenix, altered his life. "I anticipated River having a lot of hostility," he says. "I think I wanted him to be standoffish and cold. But he was really gentle and sweet. And that absolutely floored me. I was laboring under this attitude that actors in L.A. were sellouts, which was so hypocritical because I would have gone down there if I had gotten a movie. I remember riding home that night and thinking, I'm going to L.A. This is what I'm doing. I'm not staying in Seattle, doing another internship. I'll get onstage later, in New York." So, thanks to Phoenix, Fraser threw his mountain bike in his car and headed south. This meeting of Phoenix and Fraser still seems an incongruous pairing; the former destined to overdose on cocaine and heroin, the latter destined to overdose on playing cartoon characters. O f the seedier precincts that Phoenix frequented, Fraser says, "That world was never one of mine." He says he was crushed when he heard of Phoenix's death in 1993 and was "saddened that an actor of real promise, who was just finding his wings," was gone. He can still recall the way River's mother eulogized her son. "His mum seemed peaceful talking about a river being a continuum. And I don't want to overstep my bounds, but to my mind it's true because his brother, Joaquin, has picked up the grail." Fraser pauses, then tells me that he was saddened by River's death because he was "like a compass point" to him. By the time he died, Fraser notes, it was not wholly inconceivable that the two could have been paired in a film. "The campus was getting small," Fraser says. |
Matt Damon, Ben
Affleck and Chris O'Donnell - was something of a Rosetta stone
for the next generation of leading men. And Fraser got the last and
most important role cast. He played David Greene, a Jewish scholarship
student whose coach advises him to conceal his religious beliefs - a
decision that his rival for the starting QB slot (Damon) uses against
him. Fraser had to go through several auditions and a full screen test on the Paramount lot before he got the role. But even then, it seemed a done deal. "Most actors arrive at an audition in a needy frame of mind, and this dissipates their energy. But it's different when someone who is anointed comes in. Brendan projected confidence and a belief that he could handle the role," says casting director Jane Jenkins, who remembers feeling the hair on her neck stand up in a way it hadn't since she auditioned Bruce Willis for the first time nearly a decade before.
|
f
today's Jeopardy? category were the Early Works of Bruce Willis
("Alex, what is Blind Date?"), I am certain victory
would be mine in the little game of one-upmanship that Fraser and I
have been waging. And as we walk up Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in late spring, the contest has shifted to Hollywood's pseudointellectual version of rock-paper-scissors: discussing theater.
"I caught Copenhagen last night," I say, confident
that I have a winner with the mere mention of Michael Frayn's brainiac
drama about the clandestine World War II meeting between physicists
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. "Have you?"
