8 Essential Brendan Fraser Movies, In Order
Brendan Fraser is well and truly back, and we couldn't be happier.
If there was an Oscar for the most dad-core movie of the year (as there should be), Pressure would walk away with it — a movie starring Andrew Scott and Fraser that is chiefly concerned with two things that dads will never tire of talking about: D-Day and the weather.
Pressure follows the events leading up to that fateful morning in WWII from the perspective of a group of scientists tasked with making sure that the counter-offensive went down in the most favourable conditions possible. Scott (in a perfectly restrained performance) leads the line as the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg, with Fraser in the main supporting role as general (and soon to be president) Dwight D. Eisenhower. Damian Lewis and the great Kerry Condon round out the cast in a war film that looks destined to keep movie fans company on rainy Sundays for years to come. Put it this way, if you dug Oppenheimer you are probably going to enjoy this.
For Fraser, the chance to play an American president in a supporting role in some way confirms his place among the current crop of elder statesmen character actors — a position that looked a million miles away not so long ago; during that particularly fallow period that followed his meteoric rise in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. If you’re looking to dive a little deeper into that truly singular career, then start with the eight essential movies that we’ve listed — by order of release date — below.
Watching Robert Mandan’s movie School Ties today is a bit like examining a petri dish of up-and-coming '90s movie stars. There’s Chris O’Donnell, three years before he played Dick Grayson in Batman Forever. There’s Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, a few years shy of blowing up together with Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy. And then there's the guy in the lead role of David Greene, a Jewish teenager sent to a Catholic prep school where all kinds of terrible bullying awaits him, who, of course, is played by Brendan Fraser.
If the movie has a mood it's dark academia — as nobody says anymore — just don’t go in expecting the innocent camaraderie of The Holdovers or Dead Poets Society. What you can expect to see is some solid acting.
1994 was a breakout year for Fraser, if mainly as a comedic star, with leading roles in The Scout (opposite the great Albert Brooks) and With Honors (alongside Joe Pesci). The least successful but most influential of his movies that year, however, was Airheads: a hair metal satire in which Fraser plays the singer and lead guitarist of a band that also contains Adam Sandler (on drums) and Steve Buscemi (bass).
Released right after the enormously popular — and totally excellent — Wayne's World movies, Airheads was always going to look a little second rate, but it’s maintained a fanbase over the years and is now considered a bit of a cult classic. Honestly, it’s worth seeing for the outfits alone.
If there was a moment when Brendan Fraser went from being a goofy, offbeat, Gen-X-coded dude to being a bona fide Hollywood star, it has to be George of the Jungle — a modern homage to (and send-up of) the Tarzan legend that swung itself all the way to nearly a half a billion dollars at the box-office.
The movie centres on a wealthy heiress who embarks on a jungle expedition where she loses her fiancé but is saved by Fraser’s George — who she then brings with her back to San Francisco and naturally falls in love with.
If you enjoy a cheesy dollop of fish out of water — or should we say, monkey out of forest — comedy, you're probably going to love it.
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Before his recent resurgence, Fraser only occasionally dabbled in prestige movies. Granted, at that time in Hollywood, it was much rarer for a comedy actor to do both simultaneously, which is also why Gods and Monsters is such an interesting outlier.
The movie is a biopic of James Whale (Ian McKellen, in an Oscar nominated performance), an Englishman who directed the horror movie classic Frankenstein and the queer cinema classic Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s — and who was also gay. The movie mostly shows him later in life, by which point he was suffering from a degenerative disease, but it cuts back from time to time to memories from his career and his time in the trenches of WWI. Fraser plays a fictional character: a gardener who Whale asks to draw, and with whom he slowly becomes friends.
In terms of queer cinema, Gods and Monsters will probably feel quite dated by today’s standards, but to its credit it was relatively daring for mainstream cinema at that time. The final shot, in which Fraser mugs about like Frankenstein's monster while the camera cranes up to show the LA skyline, is honestly worth the entry alone.
If Fraser was wondering what side of the industry to pursue after Gods and Monsters, The Mummy basically made his mind up for him. Funnily enough, it was also a film that relaunched a Universal Studios monster that Whale himself — a friend of Boris Karloff — would have been very familiar with.
The Mummy stars Fraser and an impossibly beautiful Rachel Weisz as a pair of treasure hunters who accidentally reawaken the mummified Imhotep. A franchise of movies followed — including another which will apparently be with us next year — but the original is still where it’s at. If you’re into movies like National Treasure, trust us, it’s up there with the best of them.
Following the success of that throwback adventure tale, Fraser’s career began to pivot between family entertainment like Looney Tunes: Back in Action and awards-chasing projects like the 2005 Best Picture winner Crash. My favourite from that period is easily Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American, which features an Oscar-nominated turn from the great Michael Caine in the lead role.
The story is set in Vietnam a few years before the American army arrived, centering on a reporter (Caine) who slowly starts to suspect that an aid worker (Fraser) he's become familiar with is actually working for the CIA. If you’re curious about that world (we will see it explored again very soon in Martin McDonagh’s upcoming Wild Horse Nine) this classy film is well worth a watch.
So much has been written about Fraser’s mid-career hiatus already so let’s just say that, due to trauma in his personal life, the actor basically went off the radar between 2013 and 2019. The first whispers of a comeback came after a small but memorable turn in Steven Soderbergh’s low budget crime thriller No Sudden Move, but the biggie, suitably enough, was Darren Aronofsky's The Whale.
An adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play, this larger than life chamber drama received an enormous standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 and Fraser rode that wave all the way to a joyful Best Actor win at the Academy Awards.
The movie itself isn't for everyone, but if you liked Aronofsky's Mother!, you’ll probably be into this one, too
Since that endearing comeback story, Fraser has reinvented himself as a durable character actor, usually either in the form of blustering authority figures — like the lawyer in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon or Eisenhower in Pressure — or an endearingly melancholy dude, like the one he plays in Rental Family.
This charming, Tokyo-set movie explores the real life phenomenon from which it takes its name: namely, a service from which people can hire actors to stand in as family members — normally to fill out a wedding or birthday party, but sometimes even more personal than that.
In this one, Fraser plays an American actor who joins up to earn a bit of extra cash on the side. Of course, when he’s hired as an ersatz father for a young Japanese girl, the job starts to feel like a lot more than that.
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