“What ever happened to Brendan Fraser?”
A GQ interview with the same title published on Thursday answered exactly that for audiences who saw the leading man dominate the silver screen during the 1990s in School Ties, George of the Jungle, and The Mummy series.
Writer Zach Baron quotes Fraser as telling him over the phone, because the actor could not speak of it to him during their face-to-face interviews previously, of something that happened to Fraser “in the summer of 2003, in the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a luncheon held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that hosts the Golden Globes.”
The article reads, “On Fraser’s way out of the hotel, he was hailed by Philip Berk, a former president of the HFPA. In the midst of a crowded room, Berk reached out to shake Fraser’s hand. Much of what happened next Berk recounted in his memoir and was also reported by Sharon Waxman in The New York Times: He pinched Fraser’s ass—in jest, according to Berk.”
It continues, “But Fraser says what Berk did was more than a pinch: ‘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.’ Fraser says that in this moment he was overcome with panic and fear.”
Despite this, the actor was able to remove Berk’s hand.
“I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry,” GQ quotes Fraser as saying.
After the incident, “He rushed out of the room, outside, past a police officer he couldn’t quite bring himself to confess to, and then home, where he told his then wife, Afton, what had happened.”
According to the article, Fraser considered making the incident public. However, he said, “I didn’t want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative.”
GQ said Berk disputed the account in an e-mail: “Mr. Fraser’s version is a total fabrication.” He added that he wrote an apology to Fraser, but that “My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual ‘If I’ve done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologize.'”
Fraser said he blamed himself and became miserable after the incident, that it “made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive.”
Read the full article on GQ’s website: https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser
