NEED TO KNOW
- Brendan Fraser tells PEOPLE that he believes Dwayne Johnson fans will “be seeing a lot more of him on these red carpets in the days to come” after the latter’s new movie, The Smashing Machine, premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival
- Fraser, who caught up with PEOPLE at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of Rental Family, says his Mummy Returns costar is “a really great guy”
- Johnson’s The Smashing Machine is in theaters Oct. 3, while Fraser’s Rental Family releases Nov. 21
Brendan Fraser is just as excited about Dwayne Johnson’s new dramatic turn as everyone else!
“I know, I can’t wait,” Fraser says of Johnson’s new movie, The Smashing Machine, which premieres in Toronto on Monday, Sept. 9 after receiving rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival last week. Fraser, 56, was at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of his own film, Rental Family.
“That’s the kind of thing that you ask him to ask about me,” Fraser says with a laugh, when asked what it’s been like to watch Johnson’s career trajectory over the last two-plus decades.
Johnson, 53, memorably made his big screen debut in 2001 action-adventure sequel The Mummy Returns. After years of making action films, Johnson transformed himself to portray former UFC fighter Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, and reviews out of Venice indicate he could prove a major awards season contender this year.
“Dwayne, he’s a really great guy and it’s gonna be exciting to watch him emerge from this. I predict you’ll be seeing a lot more of him on these red carpets in the days to come,” Fraser says.
Fraser himself has experienced something of a career resurgence in recent years. Back in 2023, the actor won Best Actor at the 95th Oscars for his performance in Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 drama, The Whale. The Oscar win, Fraser’s first, capped off an awards season journey for the star that also included a Critics Choice Award and Screen Actors Guild Award.
Since making The Whale, Fraser has appeared in appeared in Behind the Curtain of Night, Killers of the Flower Moon and Brothers. In Rental Family, Fraser plays an American actor living in Tokyo who is hired by “a Japanese ‘rental family’ agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers,” according to a synopsis for the film.
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The new movie is directed by Japanese filmmaker Hikari, who told PEOPLE that she knew she wanted to cast Fraser in Rental Family after seeing him in The Whale. “He’s so vulnerable, he’s so kind, and you can see that and I think the quality that I was looking for Philip, it was just all there,” Hikari says of the actor.
“And after meeting him it was just so easy. We met for coffee and end up staying together for like 6 or 7 hours at dinner and we didn’t talk about movies, we just talk about life and that’s exactly what I was looking for,” the filmmaker continues.
Johnson’s The Smashing Machine is in theaters Oct. 3, while Fraser’s Rental Family releases Nov. 21. The Toronto International Film Festival runs through Sept. 14.
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