Fraser made his film debut in Dogfight (1991), before landing the leading role in Encino Man the following year. After several box office flops, he found major success with the 1997 comedy, George of the Jungle. His biggest success came with the 1999 movie, The Mummy, which was followed by two sequels, The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008).
In a recent episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show (2019-present), Fraser revealed how a stunt gone wrong nearly cost him his life on the set of the first film, when he was “choked out accidentally” during a scene where he had to be hanged with a rope.
“I was standing on my toes like this with the rope and you only got so far to go,” he explained. “Stephen [the director] ran over and he said, ‘Hey, it doesn’t really look like you’re choking. Can you sell it?’”
The camera set up for one more take while Fraser “went up on my toes and the guy holding the rope above me, he pulled it up a little higher and I was stuck on my toes and I had nowhere to go but down. So he was pulling up and I was going down. And then the next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways and there was gravel in my teeth.”
Fraser went unconscious for a quick moment, before the stunt coordinator shook him awake and excitedly said, “Congratulations, you’re in the club – same thing happened to Mel Gibson on Braveheart.”
After several years of hardship and depression following a tough divorce, the loss of his mother and struggling to come to terms with being abused by a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 2003, Fraser made his triumphant return to the big screen in the moving, emotional indie flick, The Whale, which earned him the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
