Brendan Fraser on His Comeback, Disappearance, and the Experience That Nearly Ended His Career

It's one of those delicious moments where you see someone you're so familiar with who is so changed by time and by experience. You kind of just clock that, and it's both so sad and wonderful. Because we all share that same time line.

Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely.

He wasn't worthy of being Superman. He wasn't even worthy of being Brendan Fraser. And this feeling ate at him as the decade wore on, and he starred in movies he was less and less proud of, and his body deteriorated, and his marriage fell apart, and he kept thinking about what had happened to him in the summer of 2003: “The phone does stop ringing

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.

I didn't want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative.

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.

He's compulsively honest. His mind is like a maze. You wander in and then emerge, hours or days later, disoriented but appreciative that something so unpredictable can still exist in this world.

You feel like: I didn't measure up. Oh, I failed. And the truth is, you didn't. That's erroneous. That's wrong. It's not true. You didn't fail. You're not. But even if you—if like, as I sit here and say that to you right now, I feel like, Well, no, no, the proof's right there.

He had the unique quality of a man beholding the world for the first time, and directors began casting him as exactly that. For much of the 1990s, Fraser spent a lot of time emerging wide-eyed from bomb shelters (Blast from the Past) or Canada (Dudley Do-Right) or the rain forest (George of the Jungle), but he also took on more serious roles.

So he left, and it took years, and some surgeries, and a horse, and the third season of a Showtime series, and now Trust, here in London, to bring him back. “Something good came out of something that was bad,” he says. “Sometimes it takes a while for that to happen.”