Brendan Fraser thinks The Mummy reboot was no fun

In 2022, Brendan Fraser is an Oscar favorite with a Martin Scorsese film in the works. But in the late ’90s/early 2000s, he was best known for playing a string of beloved himbos and dashing action heroes with a sense of humor like Rick O’Connell in The Mummy. The lightheartedness he brought to that franchise was crucial to the film’s success, if you ask the man himself.

Commenting on the attempted Tom Cruise reboot in 2017, Fraser tells Variety, “It is hard to make that movie. The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in the new one, was fun. That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying and scary.”

Of course, the kind of stunt work that such a movie requires—the same kind of work that Cruise, apparently, thrives on—is part of the reason that Fraser had to step away from being a leading man. In his 2018 GQ profile, he listed several surgeries he’d had (a laminectomy, a partial knee replacement, surgery on compressed spinal pads, and vocal cord repairs) that could be traced back to his action stardom. That is no doubt why his career renaissance has been more cerebral: “I’m in a place now where not only do I want to do the heavy lifting with my body, I also want to do it with my mind,” he shares now.

That being said, The Whale star hasn’t ruled out returning to the big screen as Rick O’Connell for a fourth installment. “I don’t know how it would work. But I’d be open to it, if someone came up with the right conceit,” Fraser says, thrilling Mummy fans everywhere. Who’s writing the script?