Brendan Fraser And Matt Damon Had To Shower Naked Together Once
Brendan Fraser and Matt Damon were both naked while filming their shower fight scene in School Ties.
Long before Brendan Fraser landed the career comeback gig of a lifetime with The Whale, he starred alongside Matt Damon in a film called School Ties. The 1992 film, which also features frequent Matt Damon collaborator, Ben Affleck, is centered around true accounts of writer and Law & Order creator Dick Wolf’s high school experiences. According to a recent interview with People, Fraser claims a scene in which he and Matt Damon fight each other in the shower was filmed while both actors were actually naked, a fact that he looks back on with discomfort.
Brendan Fraser specifies in his interview that he and Matt Damon were young, relatively unknown actors at the time. Damon wouldn’t come to be known as a household name until 1997’s Good Will Hunting, whereas Brendan Fraser’s career suffered a tumultuous rise and fall in the early 2000’s. After finding immense success as a Hollywood leading man in films such as 1997’s George of the Jungle and 1999’s The Mummy, Fraser found himself blacklisted in the entertainment industry after allegedly suffering a sexual assault from former Hollywood Foreign Press Association President Philip Berk.
Brendan Fraser noted that his nude shower scene with Matt Damon acted as a sort of synecdoche (a part that represents the whole) for his place in Hollywood, drawing parallels between his own life as an actor and the struggle of his character on screen. In School Ties, Fraser portrays David Greene, a high school student who is harassed by antisemitic students for his Jewish faith. The scene in question takes place after Matt Damon’s Charlie Dillon exposes David’s Judaism to the rest of the student body, causing the classmates to fist fight during a post football game shower in the locker room.
The revelation that both actors were nude during the shooting of this scene speaks to their discomfort in saying no as fresh faces in film. At least, that’s how Brendan Fraser recounts the memory, stating that he and Matt Damon were willing to do anything the director demanded of them in order to feel like they were fitting in and being a part of the team, just as Fraser’s character David suffers discrimination silently in order to remain on the football team.
In the end, both actors grew to have exceptional careers in Hollywood, despite a few bumps along the way. With Brendan Fraser’s career finally back on track following his incredible performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, offers have been flooding for him to return to leading roles in Hollywood, and Matt Damon continues to be a prominent figure in a myriad of films. Damon is set to star alongside Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic depicting the life of the physicist behind the Manhattan project.
While Brendan Fraser and Matt Damon each went on to reach major success, it is certainly telling that the actors were made to perform nude despite their discomfort. Hollywood has a long and storied history of disrespect for young people and those lacking agency, causing sweeping outbreaks such as 2017’s #MeToo movement to bring many cases of assault and abuse to light. Hopefully stories such as this are a sign of things changing for the better, showing how far we’ve drifted away from this culture of abuse as a society.
