Dwayne Johnson, who played the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns in what was his first film role, later spoke publicly about what Fraser had meant to him at that early career moment. When the Venice ovation happened in 2022, Johnson posted on social media that the applause had made him “so happy,” recalling that Fraser had welcomed him to the set and helped him understand what it meant to be a movie star. The relationship between the two — the already-established star and the incoming one — was one of the details that circulated in the fan response to the Venice moment, a reminder of the specific human generosity that Fraser had apparently always brought to the professional situations he moved through.
He also did theatre: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway in 2001-2002, playing Brick in Tennessee Williams’s study of alcoholism and repression in the American South. A Broadway return in Elling in 2010 closed after one week. These are not the credits of someone who had given up on craft; they are the credits of someone trying to find where he fit in a landscape that had largely pigeonholed him.
Crash, the 2004 Paul Haggis film about race and collision in Los Angeles, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Fraser appeared in it as a District Attorney, an ensemble role in an ensemble film. When the film won Best Picture at the 2005 ceremony, Fraser was part of the winning ensemble. He had been at the Oscars in 1999, had attended again in 2003, and was part of a Best Picture winner in 2005. The Academy was not unfamiliar to him before 2023.