He spent close to seven years in and out of hospitals, by his own account, dealing with the cumulative consequences of what playing Rick O’Connell had asked of his body. The career slowdown that followed the third Mummy film was not only a matter of phone calls not coming in; it was the matter of a body that had given what the role demanded and was in the process of recovering from the giving.
## The Mummy and What It Made Him
It is worth dwelling on The Mummy as a cultural artifact, because its success shaped the terms in which Brendan Fraser existed in popular culture for the next two decades — both the terms that made him beloved and the terms that made him difficult to place once the franchise era ended.
The Mummy is not a subtle film. It is an entertainment designed with the efficiency of a machine that knows exactly what it is trying to do: produce delight, produce laughs, produce thrills, and make the audience feel good by the time the credits roll. Within those constraints, it is exceptionally well-made. Fraser’s work in it is specific and intelligent — Rick O’Connell is a man who faces impossible situations with a combination of physical competence and genuinely funny dismay, and Fraser calibrated the mix precisely. He knew when to play the fear and when to play the recovery. He knew how to land a joke in a moment of action without undercutting the action.
The film’s enormous success placed Fraser in a category that is commercially valuable and creatively constraining: franchise anchor. He became, in the popular mind, Rick O’Connell, the way others became their iconic roles and found them difficult to step away from. The audience that loved him loved him as that character, in that gear, doing those things. The question of what else he could do — the question that School Ties and Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American had opened — became harder to answer when the franchise answer was doing so well.