Brendan Fraser Spills on Filming “Scary” Nude Scene with Matt Damon in ‘School Ties’

Turns out that School Ties shower scene was more NSFW than any of us knew. Brendan Fraser, who played David Greene in the 1992 drama, revealed on Tuesday’s (Feb. 7) episode of The Howard Stern Show that he and his costar Matt Damon were totally nude while filming their fight scene.

The tiff starts when Charlie Dillon, Damon’s character, tells the school football team that David is Jewish while the two of them are in the locker room showers.

“It was scary. It’s scary to do that,” Fraser said of his fully nude scene — which also happened to be his first-ever feature film. “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 told host Howard Stern that the nudity served a purpose of character development and plot, explaining, “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.”

To Fraser, Charlie’s nudity symbolizes his true self. He explained, “His anti-Semitism and his prejudice is stripped down naked, and it’s ugly. 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.”

School Ties marked the start of Fraser’s film career, and he admitted to Stern that he was so new to the industry that he thought his screen test for the movie “was like an exam or something.”

Thankfully, he aced it and went on to star in the prep school drama alongside Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris O’Donnell, and the role was an important one for the young actor.

“In a way, I felt like David because his story is that he wants to belong. For all that need of wanting to belong, I identified with that because I felt like I [wanted] to be a part … Hollywood,” he said.

Listen to Fraser’s interview with Stern in the video above.