Brendan Fraser’s Surgeries: All The Medical Procedures He Had After Grueling Early Movie Career

Brendan Fraser obtained a lot of injuries from starring in action-packed movies that led to surgeries. Find out more about them here.

• Brendan Fraser is best known as an actor.
• A large number of injuries affected his acting career throughout the years.
• Brendan just won the Academy Award in the Best Actor category for his role in ‘The Whale.’

Brandan Fraser, 54, has made his way to a successful acting career since starting his work in the film industry in the early 1990s. Although he made lasting impressions in action-packed features, like The Mummy, he unfortunately obtained a lot of injuries that caused him to have multiple surgeries over a course of seven years. The surgeries affected his career in some way and proved how dedicated to is to his craft.

Brendan’s injuries wildly started when he was making his first film, Dogfight, in 1991. He told GQ he was paid an extra $50 and got his Screen Actors Guild card for a stunt that involved him being thrown into a pinball machine, and it led to a bruised rib. This injury was followed up with some of his most serious injuries, which he got when filming the popular trilogy, The Mummy, which earned over a billion dollars.

Find out more about all the surgeries Brendan’s had to have and the injuries that caused them.

Knee Replacement

After working on the first of The Mummy movies, Brendan told Entertainment Weekly that he was “fully choked-out” for a scene during filming  and “it was scary.” The incident was during a prison scene that involved a noose. “I regained consciousness and one of the EMTs was saying my name,” he recalled. He went on to film the second two installments of the trilogy and “was put together with tape and ice.” He told GQ that he was “building an exoskeleton for myself daily” to manage existing injuries and protect his body.

Despite the attempted protection, Brendan had to have the start of his many surgeries shortly after. One of them was a partial knee replacement, which was most likely brought on by extensive damage to his knee. Knee replacement surgery “replaces parts of injured or worn-out knee joints,” according to the Mayo Clinic. “The surgery can help ease pain and make the knee work better. During the surgery, damaged bone and cartilage are replaced with parts made of metal and plastic.”

Laminectomy

Another surgery Brendan had was a laminectomy, which was brought on by back issues. A laminectomy is a surgery that “that creates space by removing bone spurs and tissues associated with arthritis of the spine,” per the Mayo Clinic. “It usually involves removing a small piece of the back part (lamina) of the small bones of the spine (vertebrae).” A laminectomy “enlarges the spinal canal to relieve pressure on the spinal cord or nerves and is often done as part of a decompression surgery.”

The pressure on the spinal cord is most often “caused by bone bony overgrowths within the spinal canal and laminectomy “is generally used only when more-conservative treatments — such as medication, physical therapy or injections — have failed to relieve symptoms. Laminectomy might also be recommended if symptoms are severe or getting much worse.”

After getting the first surgery, he reportedly had to have it again in 2022 because it didn’t work the first time.

Vocal Cord Surgery

Brendan also had to have vocal cord surgery to repair his vocal cords. Although it’s not clear exactly what caused him to have this surgery or the details behind his own experience, vocal cord surgery can sometimes be needed if the vocal cords are strained or are subject to growths and/or infection, according to News Medical.

After going through all the injuries and the surgeries needed to fix them, Brendan took a break from acting. Although it wasn’t the only reason he decided to step away from the spotlight, it was an important one. “Going to work — in between being in and out of those hospitals, that wasn’t always possible,” he told GQ in 2018. “So what I’m saying to you sounds, I hope, not like some sort of ‘Hey, I had a boo-boo. I needed to put a Band-Aid on it,’ but more of an account of the reality of what I was walking around in.”