Brendan Fraser Says He and Matt Damon Were Fully Nude for School Ties Shower Scene: 'It Was Scary'
Brendan Fraser is laying bare the real story behind the shower fight scene he had with Matt Damon in their 1992 movie School Ties.
In a guest spot on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday, the Whale star, 54, revealed that when the actors came to blows in the drama film's pivotal moment in which Damon's Charlie Dillon tells the football team that that their fellow teammate David Greene, played by Fraser, is Jewish, they were both completely naked.
"It was scary. It's scary to do that," Fraser told Howard Stern. "And when you're an actor and you're starting off, you're ambitious and game for pretty much anything. They say, 'Jump,' and you say, 'How high?' "
He continued, "I appreciated that this isn't really for wow or a scintillating factor of going, 'Hey, look at that. Naked people.' The point of it was is that when Damon's character says what he says about David, he just reveals who he is."
"His anti-Semitism and his prejudice is stripped down naked, and it's ugly," Fraser added. "And the door is locked and they fight over it like shaved apes that need to be pulled apart because they've run out of things to say to one another, and it just turns into an ugly knuckle-dusting fit."
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John Seakwood/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser in School Ties (1992)
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Fraser was new to Hollywood when he landed the role in his early 20s, and said he was still getting used to its nuances — so much so that when he was asked to "test" for then-Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing before he was offered the job, he told Stern, 69, he had no idea what that meant.
"In my naivete I thought it was, like, an exam or something like that," he said.
But similar to breaking through in Hollywood, Fraser said his character in the movie just wanted to fit in.
"In this case, David wanted to be a part of this school," he said. "He wanted the camaraderie, he wanted the glory that sport brought him. But it came at a cost, and the barrier was that he was Jewish, and their anti-Semitism kept him out."
He added, "So for all that need of wanting to belong, I identified with that because I felt like I want to be a part of this Hollywood also."
The Howard Stern Show/Youtube Brendan Fraser
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Fraser's comments come amid his triumphant return to the spotlight years after achieving fame in such movies as George of the Jungle and the Mummy franchise.
Following a 2003 incident in which the actor claimed that former Hollywood Foreign Press Association President Philip Berk sexually assaulted him while at a luncheon, Fraser has said he believes he was partly blacklisted in Hollywood. (Berk, 89, disputes the claim.)
But since the world premiere of his latest movie The Whale at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, the Oscar-nominated star has been treated to minutes-long standing ovations and an outpouring of love for his performance, including a similar response at the London Film Festival in October 2022.
"I just broke out crying. That solved all the problems," Fraser said on Late Night with Seth Meyers last month about the reception, going on to joke about the varying reports of how long the applause has lasted, "I think it depends on who's holding the stopwatch, to tell you the truth."
He added, "I feel like I'm still waiting for someone to walk in and tell me that the jig is up, you know."
