The map reading is more accurate to the actual record. He did not peak and then become a lesser version of the peak. He did major commercial work and he did serious dramatic work and he did voice work and he did theatre, and he did each of them in the spirit of someone for whom the craft itself was the through-line, not the visibility or the commercial success or the awards.
The Mummy put him on the public map in a way that defined how he was seen for a generation. The Whale returned him to the public map in a way that redrew the definition. But neither of those moments fully contains what he was doing in between them, and the full career — including Gods and Monsters and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Trust and Doom Patrol and the Brazilian film that Aronofsky happened to see — is more interesting than either the franchise star or the comeback story alone.
Fraser himself understands this, which is why his resistance to “comeback” has been consistent. He did not come back. He was always working. What came back was the public attention, and the scale of the stage, and the quality of the recognition. Those are not nothing. But they are not the same as the person who was always there, doing the work, putting one foot in front of the other, looking for material that would let him show what he could do.
He found it in The Whale. The Whale found him in Aronofsky’s memory of a trailer for a small film most people never saw. The chain of contingency that led from the trailer to the Brazilian production to the Italian theater to the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles is the kind of chain that becomes legible as destiny only after the fact; before the fact, it was just Brendan Fraser continuing to do the work and being in the position to be found when the finding happened.