Brendan Fraser explains the art of acting.

Brendan Fraser is explaining the art of acting in special- effects movies, and he grabs the nearest thing at hand – a plastic water bottle – to illustrate his point about pretending.

“It may be a misbehaving cartoon duck,” he says, holding the water bottle to his face and squinting as it squirts an imaginary jet of water into his eye. “Or it may be something that’s trying to take your head off,” he adds, shrinking back as the water bottle moves in threateningly.

What we are watching looks like outtakes from Looney Toons: Back in Action, and The Mummy, two of the special-effects films that comprise half of Fraser’s career. More than most actors, Fraser jumps between genres; he’s George of the Jungle one day, looking goofy and lost, and then he’s the hunky pool boy to Ian McKellen’s gay director in Gods and Monsters, or the angry husband of Sandra Bullock in Crash. Both kinds of movies have one thing in common.

“You’ve got to absolutely buy into it,” he says, putting down the water bottle. “And in a way it’s collaborative. It’s collaborative, and you may not know it.”

He gives the example of The Mummy Returns, where he is fighting with a mummy on top of a double-decker bus – Fraser likes to do what he calls “the fighty- punchy stuff” without stuntmen – and he was inspired to use a Three Stooges move and stick his fingers into the mummy’s eyes. This being another special effects extravaganza, there was no mummy actually there (it’s computerized into the film later), so Fraser mimed what might happen.

“There’d be mummy goo on your finger. Gross,” he says, shaking off the imaginary yuckiness. The filmmakers thought the improvisation was hilarious, and it stayed in the movie. “There’s a sense of spontaneity that you can bring to the work, whether you know it or not,” he says.

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