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Google PlayBrendan Fraser’s body-transforming turn in A24’s Darren Aronofsky film The Whale garnered huge praise at the Venice Film Festival, and his fellow The Mummy Returns actor Dwayne Johnson—who himself was unsettlingly transformed into a scorpi-human in that one—joined in the celebration on Twitter.
Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh posted a video on Sunday, since viewed 16 million times, showing a visibly emotional 53-year-old Fraser onstage at the world premiere. “The standing ovation for [The Whale] was so enthusiastic, Brendan Fraser tried to leave the theater but the crowd’s applause made him stay,” Setoodeh tweeted.
The magazine’s writeup noted the ovation was six minutes long and Fraser, who plays a 600-pound gay man trying to mend a bond with his teen daughter (played by Stranger Things MVP Sadie Sink), “sobbed throughout.”
Johnson, 50, began his transition from the WWE to Hollywood in the 2001 Mummy sequel starring Fraser and Rachel Weisz. He shared the video and wrote, “Man this makes me so happy to see this beautiful ovation for Brendan. He supported me coming into his Mummy Returns franchise for my first ever role, which kicked off my Hollywood career. Rooting for all your success brother and congrats to my bud Darren Aronofsky.”
The Rock is of course on the eve of changing the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe with Black Adam, but his future in film was far from guaranteed when he got his own critically unloved Mummy prequel, The Scorpion King, less than a year after being turned into Sega Dreamcast-quality big boss for Fraser to defeat.
Worked out for him and Hollywood in the end, though. And along the way from there to his billions in box office receipts, the Rock starred in a Journey to the Center of the Earth sequel a few years after Fraser led the franchise-starter.
Fraser had been leading big movies since 1992’s Encino Man, yet wound up the subject of a thoughtful GQ profile not inaptly titled “What Ever Happened To Brendan Fraser?” in 2018. Journalist Zach Baron said the actor “knows now that people wonder what happened to Brendan Fraser, how he went from a highly visible public figure to practically disappearing in the public mind,” and the piece delved into an alleged 2003 sexual assault that took a brutal toll on Fraser’s well-being and career. “I didn’t want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative,” he said of not going public about an alleged groping incident at the hand of former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk.
“I became depressed. … I was blaming myself and I was miserable—because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel,’” Fraser recalled, adding the experience made him “retreat” and “feel reclusive” as work “withered on the vine,” ultimately shaking his grasp on “who I was and what I was doing.”
“In my mind, at least, something had been taken away from me,” Fraser told Baron.
Speaking to Vanity Fair alongside director Aronofsky last week, Fraser said, “He said he wanted an actor to reintroduce. And I wanted to be reintroduced.”
A24’s The Whale is self-adapted by playwright Samuel Hunter and will premiere Dec. 9.
