Brendan Fraser has never met Dwayne Johnson, although he shared scenes with him in The Mummy Returns.
During his appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, Fraser shared that he and The Rock never crossed paths on the set of the 2001 sequel to The Mummy: Johnson’s character The Scorpion King, a half-human, half-scorpion creature, was added later via CGI.
“I happen to be really good at it, do you know why?” said Fraser, 54.
“Because Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was just a piece of tape on a stick in The Mummy Returns.”
(Fun fact: Johnson was also unavailable — due to his wrestling commitments — for the special effects team to photograph his face in great detail, which is likely the infamous Scorpion King sequence in the film’s final act.)
It happened to Fraser again on the set of Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003, where he shared the screen with Daffy Duck.
However, he explained: “When I was doing Looney Tunes: Back in Action, there was a Daffy Duck that was played as a puppet by Bruce Lanoil and that helped so much for your eye lines.
“They can interact with each other, which made perfect sense, and I have every right to brag about doing the right thing with Daffy Duck in the flesh.”
Fraser previously admitted he’s always made “different choices,” from his breakthrough role in George of the Jungle (1997) to the current The Whale, which saw him as best at Sunday’s (January 15) Critics’ Choice Awards brought in actors.
“I’m always making different choices and that hopefully keeps me and the audience interested,” he told Entertainment Weekly last month.
“With some detachment, I think they all cumulatively led to where I am now.”
In that interview, Fraser also stated that he was sitting out on the direct-to-video follow-up to George of the Jungle 2, which was recasting the lead role with Christopher Showerman.
He explained, “I think George got a remake and they put a joke in there about the studio being too cheap to hire me, which wasn’t inaccurate.
“I was approached. I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, but I felt like I wanted to do ‘The Quiet American’ with Michael Caine instead and make the first-ever Western film in Vietnam, directed by Phillip Noyce, about an infinity to tell American history.”
See Fraser on The Drew Barrymore Show here: