After suffering one of the biggest career dips in contemporary Hollywood throughout the late 2000s and mid-2010s as a result of health and personal issues, Brendan Fraser subsequently made one of Western cinema’s most prominent comebacks, proving his worth not only as an actor but also as a person too.
Fraser had come through with performances in Encino Man, With Honors and George of the Jungle before he made his most-loved appearance in The Mummy trilogy. After the career stall, Fraser came back in a significant way with efforts in No Sudden Move and The Whale, the latter of which saw him win the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, a truly remarkable achievement in its own right.
But it began for Fraser back in the early 1990s, and after he made his film debut in Dogfight and followed up with Encino Man, further prominence was made in the 1992 drama School Ties, and Fraser once spoke of his feelings about his big break.
“School Ties was my first feature film, and I thought it was also gonna be my last one for all I knew,” once told GQ. “So each day is one that I can remember something unique about. And all the time that I’ve been lucky enough to be making movies, so much of it becomes a blur. But because it was such an opportunity for a 22, 23-year-old actor, the gravity of it, none of it was lost on me.”
School Ties was released in 1992, directed by Robert Mandel and starring Chris O’Donnell, Randall Batinkoff, Cole Hauser, Ben Affleck and Anthony Rapp alongside Matt Damon and Fraser. Fraser plays David Greene, a Jewish high school student who is granted an athletics scholarship to an elite prep school.
Fraser then went on to discuss the impact that working with Matt Damon had on him, noting, “My screen test for it was with Matt, and I knew that I needed to match pitch with him. I wasn’t really certain how working for camera differentiated from what I was accustomed to, having just, at that time of my life, come out of training in a conservatory.”
He added, “I knew that I needed to size things down. And I also knew that if I just listened to what Matt was saying, I was getting across what needed to be acted and conveyed. And I think that’s because he’s such a good actor. He makes you better.”
Check out Fraser and Damon together in School Ties below.
