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Brendan Fraser’s first movie, Dogfight, his only line was “How’d
you like to eat my shit, huh?” In the decade since, the 31-year-old
Fraser has made more than 20 movies. And his roles - ranging from the
good-hearted Clayton Boone in Gods and Monsters to his
completely lovable George of the Jungle - have been far more
reflective of his own humor and charm. The son of a Canadian
foreign-service officer, Fraser moved with his family every three
years before finally settling near Seattle. The constant relocating,
he says, “feeds into” why he chose acting as a career: “I was
always redefining myself. I was thrust into a situation where I kind
of had to inhabit a different animal every time.”Now, in Harold Ramis’s Bedazzled, a remake of the 1967 Peter Cook/Dudley Moore film, Fraser gets to inhabit six different characters. When the film opens, he is a heartbreakingly desperate technical-support adviser in love with a beautiful co-worker (Mansfield Park’s Frances O’Connor) who has no idea he’s alive. When the Devil - in the form of Elizabeth Hurley - offers him seven wishes designed to get the girl, he sells his soul and is transformed into a series of characters, ranging from a Colombian drug lord to a famous writer. “It’s a total tour de force,” Ramis says. “It’s like a Brendan Fraser demo reel.” Offscreen, Fraser professes to be “intensely” in love with his wife of two years, Afton Smith, a former actress he met eight years ago in L.A. when her dog sought him out at a Fourth of July party. Onscreen, Fraser’s heartthrob status was cemented with The Mummy. |
Director
Stephen Sommers says he chose Fraser because “he could be heroic and
charming at the same time, somewhere between Errol Flynn and Harrison
Ford.” It’s not the first time Fraser has been mentioned in such
high-flying company. Ramis says Fraser also can be “like Cary Grant,
very deft.” Indeed, in Richard Benjamin’s Mrs. Winterbourne,
when Fraser does the tango with unlikely costar Ricki Lake, he manages
to evoke Grant’s trademark bemused and athletic wit. “It takes a
very special kind of charm to make Ricki Lake look like a movie star,”
says one prominent Hollywood screenwriter. It also takes a special
kind of generosity. Ramis says that there is a tendency among actors -
“and I’m guilty of it” - to “repudiate” the work when the
films don’t measure up to the talent. Fraser, he says, doesn’t do
that. “He’s committed.” |
appears in the sequel, Fraser jokes that he “had better eat my
Wheaties.” He probably won’t need them. He may be a nice guy, but
he is not without edge. “I’ve got a backbone and a mean left hook
when I need it.”
