What the two films together implied was a genuine range — he could do comedy, he could do drama, he had the presence to anchor a film, the technique to do something with it. The question of which kind of Brendan Fraser Hollywood would choose to invest in was still open.
Hollywood chose comedy, and then adventure, and then the extraordinary hybrid that The Mummy would eventually become.
In the middle years of the 1990s, he worked steadily — With Honors (1994), Airheads (1994), The Scout (1994), In the Army Now (1994), an eclectic mix of projects that didn’t always succeed commercially but demonstrated a performer willing to try different registers. George of the Jungle in 1997 was the first time his particular gifts were given a project specifically engineered for them: a physical comedy starring him as a Tarzan-esque figure raised by animals in Africa, dropped into contemporary San Francisco, and required to be simultaneously a running sight gag and an oddly sincere romantic lead. The film worked. It made money. Kids loved it. Audiences left with the distinct impression that Brendan Fraser was someone worth watching.
The same year brought Gods and Monsters, Ian McKellen’s career-defining film about the last days of Frankenstein director James Whale, in which Fraser played Boone, a gardener drawn into Whale’s inner life. It is a completely different register from George of the Jungle — restrained, precise, emotionally alert. It demonstrated once again that the range was real.
## The Quiet American, Crash, and the First Signs of Physical Cost