Brendan Fraser

Two 1992 releases made him, and they pulled in opposite directions: a comedy about a defrosted caveman and a prep-school drama about a Jewish scholarship student. Fraser ran both lanes at once for a decade. He was the last of the studio physical comedians, a very large man entirely willing to be humiliated for a laugh, and he was also good enough in Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American that critics kept waiting for him to turn serious permanently.

Rick O'Connell explains him better than any of it. The Mummy works because Fraser plays adventure as a good mood: no brooding, no reluctance, just a man delighted to be shooting at something. That is a harder trick than it looks, and it is why nobody has convincingly replaced that film. George of the Jungle and Blast from the Past run the same engine, sincerity played completely straight, which is why they hold up better than most late-nineties comedies.

Then the leading roles stopped. The 2010s are thin: a few small pictures, supporting runs on prestige television, and voice work as a brain in a metal body on Doom Patrol, where he was very good and largely unseen. The Whale ended that in 2022 and won him the Academy Award for Best Actor and a Screen Actors Guild lead-actor award. Killers of the Flower Moon put him back in front of a large audience the following year as a loud, sweating lawyer in about four scenes, and he has kept working since.