Brendan Fraser He is one of the actors of the moment. The 54-year-old performer is Oscar nominee for best actor For The whalewhich marked the return to the big screen after years have disappeared from the map.
The actor was an icon of the 90s thanks to his roles in several well-known sagas such as The Mummy oh George of the Jungle but then he crossed hard personal episodes that led him to the shade where he was until the film which tells the story of a morbidly obese man who tries to win back the affections of his teenage daughter.
Victim of sexual abuse in 2003
One of those moments was in 2003 when was sexually abused by Philip Berk, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It took Brendan Fraser many years to make it public.
“I have more history with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association than I have respect for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” he told the magazine. QG. At the time, he was 35 and his attacker was 70. As he said, he made sexual advances to her and touched her ass multiple times.
“His left hand is outstretched, grab my ass and one of his fingers touches my perineum. And start moving it. I felt like a little child. I felt like I had a lump in my throat. I thought I was going to cry,” in another interview in 2018. “I felt like someone threw invisible paint at me.”
Brendan went to report itbut the Association intervened to get them to come to an agreement arguing that it was only a joke.
This is the organization behind the Golden Balls, which is why the actor has made it clear on several occasions that he has no plans to go to a gala until they acknowledge what happened and issue a public apology. “No, I won’t participate… It’s because of the history I had with them. My mother didn’t raise a hypocrite. You can call me a lot of things, but not like that”, he underlined in a recent interview with QG.
Post-divorce depression and death of her mother
In 1998, at the height of his professional career, Brendan Fraser married Afton Smith, an actress he had met five years earlier at a party at Winona Ryder’s. with her he had three sons –Griffin, Holden and Leland – and eventually divorced in 2007, a year after the little one was born.
The divorce proceedings were very tough, stretching over two years, and ended in court, where justice sentenced him to pay his ex-wife. $900,000 annually in alimony and alimony (75,000 per month). He claimed that he could not afford these payments because his income was lower and he had many pending bills of medical processes. Given this, Smith sued him accusing him of “fraud”.
In addition, in 2016 his mother died of cancer, which put him through a few years of severe depression, as he recounted in 2018, and is why he chose to move away from Hollywood.
Feeling guilty for a child with ASD
Her eldest son, Griffin, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he turned two, in 2004, news that made Fraser very sad and even made him blame himself for it. During a recent radio appearance, he admitted to being “shattered” by the news and even tried to find doctors and specialists who could cure him.
“When I learned of my son’s diagnosis at 22 or 24 months, I was shocked. My first reaction was, ‘How can I solve this problem? What is the cure? What is this? means?’ as if they were hitting me with a baseball bat on his head. I just thought ‘This is not right,’ he said.
Given this, he blamed the decisions he had made for years with his body: “I blamed myself. I thought ‘Is it my genes? Is it because of the weed I smoked in college? It’s like trying to get a straight answer from a Leprechaun.”
Eventually, with a lot of help, he was able to put those feelings behind him and is now doing all he can to be there for them: “This boy has the greatest joy i have ever seen, and it turns out he’s my son. I want to know what he thinks, that he’s so incredibly funny all day, that he’s always cracking up. He loves to take a ride no matter where you take him.”
His delicate state of health
Over the years, the actor has had tough episodes that have damaged his mental health, while faced significant physical injuries because of the decisions you made when you were young. In his first films, like The Mummynever wanted to have stuntmen and he was hospitalized several times.
“I had a noose around my neck and the specialist tightened it so much that I stood on my tiptoes. I’m not exactly a dancer, and I couldn’t stand on my tiptoes. I only remember seeing the camera start rolling and a fade to black, like the end of a silent movie. It was like turning down the volume on your stereo. I almost completely drowned. It was terrifying,” he said of a scene from that movie.
Fraser was in and out of the operating room for nearly eight years due to various health issues such as broken ribs, broken knees, back injuries, vertebrae or vocal cord injuries, among others.
“When I made the third film of The Mummy in China they had to stick me with duct tape and ice. I needed ice packs with a screw cap and pads for mountain biking because they are small and light and can fit under your clothes,” he laughed.
After many years of tragic episodes, serious mental health issues and dozens of operations, Brendan Fraser has managed to recover and get back on top thanks to the movie The whale.