Before The Mummy, there was one more significant marker of Fraser’s dramatic ambitions: The Quiet American (2002), an adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel set in 1950s Saigon, in which Michael Caine played a British journalist and Fraser played the title character, an idealistic American whose presence in Vietnam carries quietly devastating consequences. The film received strong reviews, and Fraser’s work in it was considered by critics who paid attention to it one of his more accomplished performances.
But The Quiet American was not a summer blockbuster. It came out in the shadow of The Mummy Returns (2001) and the first wave of what would eventually be recognized as the toll of playing Rick O’Connell.
The Mummy, released in 1999, was the film that defined the middle of Fraser’s career with a thoroughness that was both a gift and, eventually, a burden. Directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Fraser as Rick O’Connell, an adventurer tangling with supernatural forces in 1920s Egypt, it was designed as an action comedy — a film that wanted the fun of Raiders of the Lost Ark without the weight. It cost approximately $80 million and grossed over $415 million worldwide. Its sequel, The Mummy Returns (2001), grossed over $433 million worldwide.
Rick O’Connell required Brendan Fraser to do things that actors’ bodies are not designed to sustain indefinitely. The role involved extensive stunt work, physical combat sequences, running and jumping and falling that, across two films and years of production schedules, accumulated into a roster of specific medical consequences. He would later describe what those years cost him in a 2018 interview with GQ: a laminectomy (surgical removal of part of a vertebra, typically performed to relieve pressure on spinal nerves), a partial knee replacement, and vocal cord repair. He described the experience of making The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), the third film in the franchise and the one filmed after most of the damage had been done, as feeling “held together with tape and ice packs.”