Brendan Fraser reveals why it was 'scary' to film naked shower fight with Matt Damon in 'School Ties'
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Brendan Fraser is receiving applause for his bravura performance in 'The Whale' – but the acclaimed actor still remembers feeling scared when he had to strip down for his first breakout role in 'School Ties.' Fraser played the role of David in the 1992 film, the story of a Jewish boy attending a prep school with a group of antisemitic classmates.
Tensions between Fraser's character and his co-star Matt Damon's Charlie reaches the climax point when the boys confront one in the communal shower. During an appearance on 'The Howard Stern Show', Fraser confirmed he was fully nude during the fight scene and that filming it was far from easy.
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'Ugly knuckle-dusting fit'
"It was scary. It's scary to do that," Fraser told the host, Howard Stern. "When you're an actor and you're starting off, you're ambitious and game for pretty much anything. They say, ‘jump’ you say ‘how high?’ But at the same time, I appreciated that this isn't really for wow or a scintillating factor of ‘hey look at that, naked people,'" he said of the scene. "The point of it was - is that when Damon's character says what he says about David, it just reveals who he is. His antisemitism and his prejudice are stripped down naked and it's ugly," Fraser said of Damon's character. "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. And that's the point of the scene, really."
'He wants to belong'
Fraser admitted that, in hindsight, he could relate to his character wanting to be a part of something. "Making ‘School Ties,’ in a way, I felt like David because his - his story is that he wants to belong," he explained. "At some point in our lives or another, we've all felt like we've had our noses pressed up against the glass and there's something keeping us out and we want to be a part of what's in there. In this case, David wanted to be a part of this school… He wanted the camaraderie… He wanted the glory that sport brought him. But it came at a cost, and the barrier was - is that he was Jewish and their antisemitism kept him out. 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."
Director Robert Mandel discussed the impact of the film in honor of its 20th anniversary last fall, also commenting on that notorious shower scene. "The shower scene is a pretty big scene for these guys who have never been on camera before," he told Yahoo Entertainment. "That scene, although it was written in the script, was not addressed in the screen test. It was: you’re on the set and you do it at a certain point in the movie when everybody is very cohesive… But you still ask, and you still want them to do it. And they were, they were good about it," Mandel said of Fraser and Damon. The filmmaker said the scene was impactful "for all of them" and that the shoot was rather professional. "You close the set and you do what you need to do," Mandel added.
Fraser admitted he auditioned twice for the movie after the film's original director rejected him. He recalled reading for the role of David with Damon. "Matt Damon was my scene partner… He's already got the job… You know, this is my shot here and I'm going ‘Okay, don’t mess this up… Bring things down a size.' I was used to being on stage at that point in my life and playing to the back row, and I knew that I needed to match pitch with Matt…I felt like…I was his wingman or something. And I think that's why I got hired," Fraser recounted, per Fox News.