Brendan Fraser Recalls How He "Nearly Died" Filming The Mummy

By Cameron Bonomolo

Brendan Fraser recalled a scary incident on the set of The Mummy. The fan-favorite 1999 film starred Fraser as American adventurer and treasure-seeker Rick O'Connell, who meets librarian Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) from behind bars in a Cairo prison. During an appearance on Tuesday's episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, Fraser remembered how he "nearly died" filming a stunt sequence where Rick is hanged by prison warden Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili). When the drop doesn't break Rick's neck, he's left to dangle beneath the platform and "strangle to death." You can watch the sequence below. 

"I was choked out accidentally in the hanging sequence," Fraser told Clarkson of the stunt gone wrong. "I was standing on my toes like this, with the rope [around my neck], and you only got so far to go. And [director Stephen Sommers] ran over and he said, 'Hey, it doesn't really look like you're, you know, choking — can you sell it?' And I was like, 'All right, fine.' So I thought, 'One more take, man.'"

Fraser continued: "The camera swooped around, and I went up on the toes, and the guy holding the rope above me, he pulled it up a little higher and I was stuck on my toes. I had nowhere to go but down, and so he was pulling up, and I was going down. The next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, there was gravel in my teeth, and everyone was really quiet."

After being "choked out," Fraser recalled the reaction of the stunt coordinator: "'Congratulations, you're in the club. The same thing happened to Mel Gibson on Braveheart.'" Fraser added with a laugh, "Thanks, I think?! I want to go home!"

Fraser starred in three Mummy movies between 1999 and 2008, following the hit 1999 film with The Mummy Returns and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. In October, Fraser said he was "open" to a fourth Mummy movie "if someone came up with the right conceit," but the star later revealed that the stunt and action-heavy trilogy took a toll on his body.

"I got a little banged up from years of doing my own stunts and needed a surgical fix on the spine and the hinges [of the knee]," the Oscar-nominated The Whale actor recently told The Telegraph. By the third film, Fraser said, he was putting himself "together like a gladiator with muscle tape and ice packs, strapping on this Transformer-like exoskeleton just to get through the scene."

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"Those physical performances, whether fighting, dancing or comedy, had an element of self-sacrifice," Fraser added. "But it wasn't very clever of me at all."

The Mummy trilogy is currently streaming on Hulu.

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