Brendan Fraser was once seemingly omnipresent on the big screen, dominating the box office with leading roles in everything from Encino Man in 1992 to a series of Mummy films that ended in 2008. But for quite some time he's been off the Hollywood radar; when he popped up in 2016 on the third season of Showtime series The Affair, he gave his first interview in years—and the uncomfortable sit-down went viral thanks to a "morose"-seeming Fraser, writes Zach Baron in a GQ profile of Fraser in which the actor explains that interview and more. His mother had just died, and he'd had a strange decade: "I changed houses; I went through a divorce. Some kids were born. I mean, they were born, but they're growing up. I was going through things that mold and shape you in ways that you're not ready for until you go through them." But there was more.
Fraser wasn't ready to recount it at the time, but a few weeks later, he called Baron and relayed to him his side of a story that had already been told by former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk about the 2003 Golden Globes. Berk has previously admitted to jokingly pinching Fraser's butt during an encounter at the awards show, but Fraser says it was actually much worse: "His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around." (Berk denies his account.) The experience left Fraser "blaming myself" and "miserable," he says; he was also suffering physically thanks to his strenuous work in action movies, and his career "withered on the vine." Now he's back, thanks to The Affair as well as an FX series he's shooting, Trust. Baron's full piece on the intervening years is worth a read. (More Brendan Fraser stories.)
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