Interview: Brendan Fraser
The Family Guy

With acclaimed dramas like Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American a distant memory, Brendan Fraser has boldly become king of the family flicks. Inkheart, his third fantasy film in just seven months, has the amiable actor battling odd characters sprung from a storybook

Perhaps more than any other actor working today, Brendan Fraser has acted opposite nothing — or nothing more than a piece of tape on a green-screen.

It goes with the territory that his oeuvre tends to skew young — three Mummy movies (including last year’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, two films in which his co-stars were cartoon characters (Looney Toons: Back in Action and Monkeybone), one in which they were animatronic animals (George of the Jungle) and his latest, Inkheart, in which the characters from a fantasy novel find their ways into our world with dire results.

Fraser, who grew up partly in Toronto and has three boys with ex-wife Afton Smith (they split last year), admits his offspring’s approval motivates his frequent choice of kid-flicks. “I don’t know one parent who doesn’t want to make some contribution to the world that their kids will be proud of,” he says in a recent Toronto interview. “Not that that necessarily comes to pass, because it’s all about Spongebob Squarepants in my house right now. Did you know he lives in a pineapple under the sea? It’s amazing the things I’ve learned.”

As for playing against nothing, he says “therein lies the question. Is nothing really there? As long as it lives in your imagination, then the people you’re collaborating with — the CGI and visual effects artists — can link together your organic performance with their electronic ones and give it to the audience and have them believe it.”

Brendan Fraser (centre) protects some of Inkheart’s other characters

As it happens, imagination is the linchpin of Inkheart, the first of German author Cornelia Funke’s just-finished trilogy of storybook-comes-to-life tales to make it to the big screen (the others are Inkspell and Inkdeath).   “She writes in a fantasy world of her imagination that you can compare to sword and sorcery,” Fraser says. “Fairies and goblins aside, it’s literature that doesn’t condescend to the reader.”   “My character’s called Mo — Mortimer Folchart — who has an unusual ability, a blessing or a curse, although more of a curse when we meet him and his 12-year-old daughter. The mother’s gone missing in mysterious circumstances. When Mo reads aloud, elements of what he reads appear, and as a trade off, other things disappear into the story — in this case, unfortunately, it’s his wife that disappears.”

All of which is still a mystery when we meet Mo and his daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett). They’ve spent the past nine years in Europe on a quest to find Meggie’s mother Resa (Sienna Guillory), unaware that the trade off with the storybook dimension has brought three characters from Inkheart into our own world — the evil Capricorn (Andy Serkis), his henchman Basta (Jamie Foreman) and a “fire-eater” named Dustfinger (Paul Bettany).

Things become clear when the homesick Dustfinger shows up demanding to be sent home. And they become dire when Capricorn kidnaps Meggie to gain control of Mo’s power.

“It kind of takes place in a world the day before yesterday after tomorrow next week,” says Fraser, who’s fond of enigmatic explanations. “There’s anachronisms, futuristic things, medieval graffiti. [Director] Iain Softley met with the set designers, a lot of whom worked on movies like [Terry Gilliam’s] Baron Munchausen.”

In fact, cinematographer Roger Pratt is a veteran of Gilliam films going back to the Monty Python days.

“So there are effects,” Fraser continues. “But the thing about it is it’s actually kind of light on the visual effects compared to the other things I’ve done. It’s much more about the acting. Paul Bettany is great in this, and Andy Serkis.”

And then there’s Helen Mirren as Elinor Loredan, Meggie’s book-crazy great aunt and confidant. “[We shot the movie] the year she took home her Oscar, and she turned out to be great fun. She showed up with it and we got to pass it around,” Fraser says with a grin.

Since he has some indie cred (notably 1998’s Gods and Monsters, which earned Oscar noms for two of his co-stars, Ian McKellen and Lynn Redgrave), Fraser takes slight umbrage to the suggestion that his is a career entirely rooted in fantasy and special effects. “The only way I know how to answer that, my friend, is I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know an actor who idles well. I’m happy to be working and I’m fortunate to do what I feel I’m comfortable with, and sometimes a bit uncomfortable with.

“I’ve tended to learn new things from some of the more thoughtful, darker independent pictures like The Quiet American, or a film I made in Sao Paolo that nobody saw,” continues Fraser. “It was called Journey to the End of the Night, and it was six weeks of nights all on location. It was a very dark tale, Scott Glenn is a brothel owner and it’s about his son’s desire to get out of there. Every film is different. It’s the challenge of where you’re going to go and the muscles you’re going to stretch and pull.”

But in an interview, the kid in Brendan Fraser can return with the slightest impulse. His face brightens when the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra comes up, a film in which Fraser has a small role as the motorcycle-riding great-great-grandson of his Mummy character Rick O’Connell, a part given to him by G.I. Joe producer Bob Ducsay, also the producer of The Mummy movies.

“I begged Bob to let me be in it. He was the only one with a smile on his face one night in Shanghai when we were shooting Dragon Emperor. I said ‘What are you so happy about?’ And he said ‘I just got the greenlight to do Joe from Paramount.’ So the next question was ‘Can I be in it? Please, please, please?’

“Because I loved G.I. Joe. I was like every kid, y’know,” he says, accessing memories of his schoolboy days spent living in Toronto. “I had one wind up in a tree, twisting in the wind by his parachute for a winter.”