Brendan Fraser Almost Landed in Steven Spielberg’s Hate List, All Thanks to a Harmless Joke

Relationships in the entertainment industry are often built like a house of cards. Just like a performance might make or break an actor, one wrong remark could also ruin someone’s career. Celebrities, especially rising actors, are often found to be careful about how they are perceived by industry giants.

Brendan Fraser’s career shows how an actor can rise to fame overnight and how a single moment can also potentially impact a career negatively. And in one such moment, he came close to offending none other than legendary director Steven Spielberg.

Brendan Fraser Almost Risked Offending Steven Spielberg

It was clear from his youth that Brendan Fraser held some passion for performance. He was fascinated by theater as a kid. In an interview with NME, he revealed how his first visit to a professional theatre show was of Oliver! when he was young, sparked his passion for acting.

This spark would have him act in high school musicals, and later on, he graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in 1990. He was passionate about acting. But soon, he was about to learn a very important thing about Hollywood.

In the mid-90s, Fraser was in a play named Four Dog And a Bone, which was a satire on the movie business. The actor performed in the play alongside others like Parker Posey, Elizabeth Perkins, and Martin Short. In an interview with Deadline, Fraser revealed an incident that could have potentially offended Steven Spielberg.

It was a little bit self-assured. It was being presented at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, Los Angeles… There was a joke in it about Steven Spielberg, and a prop was made that had his picture on the cover of Time Magazine. Marty’s character holds it up and cracks a joke about Steven Spielberg, and on opening night, there’s Steven Spielberg.

Since Spielberg himself was in the audience, the whole theater anticipated the response of the master filmmaker. Fraser added,

The joke was coming, and everybody in the audience wanted to see what Spielberg was going to do, because they knew it was coming. Anything can happen on a stage, as well it should, but the lesson is, the show must go on, and I think it’s important to get the rust out of the chains.

Although the whole production planned and produced the script and the satire, Fraser was the one who later became the most popular actor among others and risked his relationship with the director. However, Spielberg’s reputation did not suffer due to their joke.

Brendan Fraser’s Career Revival and Aspirations of Production

Fraser has enjoyed the highest moments of his career while facing some of the most severe adversities ever. He took his first steps towards fame in the ‘90s with comedies like Encino Man and George of the Jungle and got global stardom with The Mummy franchise.

Furthermore, there was a period of time in Fraser’s career between the late 2000s and the early 2010s when he struggled to find regular work. The circumstances concerning his family and his private life, like several operations, the sexual assault controversy, and the death of his mother, became the reasons for leaving the public eye.

However, Fraser started his comeback with shows and movies like Doom Patrol, No Sudden Move, and The Whale. He even won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Whale.

Fraser now aims to become a producer in the near future. In his Deadline interview, he revealed,

I’m glad to be able now to feel like I can have a voice that’s pertinent in the early stages of developing screenplays. I’m no director. I don’t want to be, but I do have interest in producing and that’s where I’ll head next.

After almost 35 years of work with so many acting credits, he feels the right to help and create stories off-camera. It seems interesting how his career could possibly have taken a completely different turn if Spielberg had decided to get offended that day.