Brendan Fraser - Brief Article - Interview

Interview, June, 2000 by Sam Hamm

SAM HAMM: I need your counsel. I have a new beagle in the house. How do I establish dominance?

BRENDAN FRASER: Well, there's always the old Navaho Indian trick of crying and begging [laughs]. As you know, I have a chihuahua I acquired while working on the set of Monkeybone.

SH: How exactly did you acquire her?

BF: There was a kid standing right at the exit to the parking lot who had a bucket of these dogs, and he was looking more hangdog than the puppy was. I didn't know if the chihuahua would get on well with Wylie, my other dog. So to try it out I struck a deal [ldots] I gave them all the cash in my wallet, which was like sixty bucks, and said, "Can I just rent the dog?" So the dog came home with me and she and Lucy are now fast friends.

SH: Let's talk about work. Actors today tend to find a niche, but you've had great success in a variety of genres.

BF: I think you should be able to do a little bit of everything. I'm looking for projects that combine all the things I love.

SH: A lot of people are kind of shocked when they see how terrific you are in Gods and Monsters. And in both The Mummy and Monkeybone [to be released in the fall] you give remarkably focused performances with characters whom you basically have to imagine.

BF: Oh, thank you very much, Sam.

SH: Ow! I just broke my nose on your ass! Do you have a special technique or are you just prone to hallucination?

BF: [laughs] The answer is Yes. I think probably there has to be a combination of shameless risk-taking and excellent writing[ldots]. Do you hear that dog?

SH: Yes.

BF: OK, that would be Lucy. Someone is at the door. She's bored with me kissing my own ass.

SH: Boy, she's got a big, surly voice for a chihuahua. We ought to devote a word or two here to Monkeybone, actually being the movie that we shot this year [and which Hamm wrote]. You're now in the middle of shooting Bedazzled, yet through the miracle of stop-motion animation, Bedazzled will probably come out first. In Bedazzled you get to work with Elizabeth Hurley, who is very much alive, and in Monkeybone you're playing across a stop-motion animated monkey.

BF: I think the name we had for the monkey on set, a green ball of tape, was The Booger.

SH: The Green Booger, yes. Without giving too much of the plot away, it's a story of a man possessed by his own creation [ldots] a man who, for a long stretch of the picture, has the soul of a monkey and gets to unleash all of his bizarre impulses.

BF: I think he makes a pretty good monkey in and of himself.

SH: See, nobody believes me when I tell them that this picture is autobiographical. There's a monkey within all of us.

Screenwriter Sam Hamm's next picture is Monkeybone. Brendan Fraser, photographed with Lucy, his chihuahua.