Brendan Fraser’s ‘Trust’ Comeback Began With a Role on ‘The Affair’ You Have to See to Believe

“I utterly believed him.” So said director Danny Boyle of Brendan Fraser‘s role as an abusive prison guard on Showtime’s dark kaleidoscope of a drama The Affair. It’s an odd compliment to receive when you’ve just played an utter bastard, but Boyle — the Academy Award winner behind Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire — knows his way around bastards, and in the curious case of Brendan Fraser, it was entirely well deserved.

Boyle told GQ earlier this year that after watching Fraser’s work on the show hired the actor to play the oddball ex-CIA officer turned private investigator James Fletcher Chace on his new anthology series Trust, chronicling the outrageous fortunes of the Getty oil dynasty. More than just a henchman, Fraser’s Chace is a fourth-wall breaking narrator — the liaison between the audience and the stranger-than-fiction world he himself inhabits. It’s a smart choice, one that centers an actor already known and loved by millions from his roles in blockbusters like The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as goofy comedies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man, and even Oscar fare like Gods & Monsters and Crash. We all like Brendan Fraser. And it’s because he played a hateful character on The Affair that we all get the chance to like him again.

Airing in late 2016-2017, The Affair Season Three featured Fraser as John Gunther, a hulkingly sinister corrections officer presiding over the incarceration of one of the main characters. Despite having long been an outspoken admirer of the show, I was nonetheless taken aback when I first saw Fraser appear onscreen. For one thing, the twisty drama from Sarah Treem, chronicling the lives of two couples rocked by an extramarital relationship, had never featured such an obvious heavy. For another, I hadn’t read the industry news about him getting hired, and I hadn’t seen him in, well, anything in quite some time. Now here he was, a supporting player — and, as quickly become apparent, a major antagonist — in a sleeper Showtime drama about sex, love, loss, big-city morals, and small-town secrets, some of which turn out to be deadly.

And he wasn’t just in the show — he was great in it. The bright eyes I remembered from his A-list days had gone dead and menacing. His action-figure physique had become slouchier and stockier, yet he’d lost none of his ability to physically impose and intimidate. His demanding role required him first to befriend and then betray main character Noah Solloway, played by Dominic West, himself an intimidating actor when the role requires it. Yet Fraser was completely convincing in his ability to taunt, torment, beat, and even sexually abuse his prisoner. Casting him against his square-jawed heroic type accounted for a big part of the impact, sure. But you could tell this wasn’t just an actor coasting on expect-the-unexpected fakery. He was giving this everything he had.

What’s more, as Noah’s mental state deteriorates following his release, clouding his memories and distorting his perception of reality as he comes to believe Gunther is stalking him, Fraser’s performance slowly morphs from the all-too-believable power-tripping of a thuggish law enforcement officer to the near-supervillain status. Simply by appearing on the show he already had to navigate its complex, conflicting-POV structure, but this was an even higher degree of difficulty. I won’t spoil the season’s climactic revelation about Noah and Gunther’s true relationship, but suffice it to say it requires Fraser to hit brand-new notes in his portrayal of the man, which he once again does with utter conviction. I wrote early on in the season that Fraser was “clearly exploding with glee at the chance to play a Jame Gumb–style mumble-mouthed maniac”; little did I know how much more he had in him.

But there’s an additional, viral twist to the story of Fraser’s Affair stint. In the course of promoting his role on the show, he took part in a now-infamous interview with Ricky Camillleri for AOL’s Build series. (Full disclosure: Ricky’s a friend of a bunch of us here at Decider, so this is a case of a rising tide lifting all boats as far as we’re concerned.) Fraser’s obvious discomfort with being back in front of a live audience, his pallid complexion and retiring body language, and his soft-spoken, bordering on sorrowful voice struck a nerve with viewers who remembered the vibrant, wide-eyed, upbeat action hero of yore. Clips from the interview racked up millions of view, but behind the snark and shitposting it was clear that Fraser’s many fans were genuinely concerned, and hoped for better things for the actor in the future. It’s the reason Fraser’s comeback — the Brenaissance, if you will — is a big deal.

If the Sad Brendan Fraser meme that resulted from the interview never reached Crying Jordan levels, it wasn’t for lack of sadness, that’s for sure. As reported in Zach Baron’s incredible profile of Fraser for GQ, the actor was mourning the loss of his mother to cancer just a few days prior to the interview. In addition, Fraser says he was sexually assaulted by a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that runs the Golden Globes, in 2003. (The man in question, Philip Berk, denies the allegations.) This event, Fraser told Baron, sent him into a depressive spiral that hampered his ability to work for years afterwards. Add in the physical toll of his demanding action roles, plus the emotionally and financially taxing experience of divorcing the mother of his three children, and the mystery of his seeming disappearance from the scene starts to clear up.

Which makes his current comeback something of a personal as well as professional triumph. And basically all of it — the Trust gig, the viral-interview fame that preceded it and the the breathtaking honesty of the profile that ensued — can be tracked back to John Gunther, corrections officer, from The Affair Season Three. That’s a job well done.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Affair on Showtime