What Brendan Fraser loves about a classic sci-fi novel | CBC Loaded What Brendan Fraser loves about a classic sci-fi novel American Canadian actor Brendan Fraser joins Antonio Michael Downing on The Next Chapter to talk about his lifelong appreciation for the sci-fi genre. The American-Canadian actor stars in the Audible Original of Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded Posted: Dec 05, 2025 10:00 AM EST | Last Updated: 1 hour ago Play Listen to this article Estimated 6 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence. Brendan Fraser stars in the Audible Original adaptation of Robert J. Sawyer's The Downloaded as Roscoe Koudolian. (Audible.ca) Social Sharing When American Canadian actor Brendan Fraser won his first Academy Award in 2022 for his leading role in The Whale, on stage he said, “so this is what the multiverse looks like!” Known for his iconic films of the late 90s and early 2000s like The Mummy and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Fraser has built a multiverse of his own adventures on screen, and the common thread has often been his love for science fiction and fantasy. “As a kid I was a Ray Bradbury fan and I did grow up in the Star Trek generation,” said Fraser. “Sci-fi as a genre? Yeah! I love the innovations that I saw in films and I loved classic sci-fi films.” Fraser returns to the dystopian genre in his portrayal of Mayor Roscoe Koudolian in the Audible Original series, The Downloaded Two: Ghosts in the Machine. Written by Hugo Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer, the novel follows a man tasked with bringing up a group of people to set up a colony on Mars. On an episode of The Next Chapter, Fraser shares what keeps him coming back to sci-fi with host Antonio Michael Downing and digs into a backlist of his favourite classics. LISTEN | Brendan Fraser on The Next Chapter: The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing27:32What books drew Brendan Fraser to storytelling? 'The power of the spoken word' Born to Canadian parents, Fraser and his family travelled and lived all over the world, providing many opportunities to listen to audiobooks, or “books on tape,” on long car rides. “I had been reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, loved them and I listened to it,” he said. British author Douglas Adams' infamous comedy sci-fi series originated as a radio sitcom on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. Adams published five novels following one of Earth's sole survivors, Arthur Dent as he traverses the galaxy searching for his life's purpose. Fraser recalls listening to a lot of audio plays when he lived in Holland as a kid and how that may have jumpstarted his love for telling stories. “I can always remember feeling captivated and taken to another place just by the power of the spoken word and I guess that's when it started for me.” Are monsters real? For Fraser, there are stories he read in childhood that he always comes back to, one of which is a short story called The Swan from a 1977 collection by British writer Roald Dahl. In the dark tale, a young boy witnesses two of his bullies kill a swan and then escapes them by taking on the creature’s wings, soaring above and beyond his expectations of himself. “I attached to Roald Dahl at an early age, knowing nothing about who he was as an author and a person and if or not his works still hold up,” noted Fraser. That said, Fraser remembers how that imagery opened up a “realm of possibilities that weren’t just culled from fantasies.” “I mean the damage that does to be tormented that way, but the aspect of being freed and flying away almost Icarus-like was something that stuck in my mind. How magically real?” What we can all learn from Brendan Fraser's triumphant second act Despite the maturity within some of Dahl’s stories, the fantasy genre was important to how a young Fraser made sense of real-world struggles. “I think it gave a young reader … such as myself, and many others too, clearer understanding that there are monsters in the world. “We can reckon with them better if we can look at more closely the ones who are fantasies or who are works of fiction to prepare us for the challenges of just being our very human selves.” A beloved Canadian classic As an adult, many of Fraser’s notable films have been book adaptations, rife with emboldened heroes and themes of resistance against the powers that be. He has played everything from a treasure hunter to a volcanologist and now the leader of a new Martian colony in The Downloaded, but a role he would have loved to play when he was younger is that of a soldier in author Timothy Findley’s Canadian classic, The Wars. “It gave me just such an insight into the First World War about a young Canadian who travels to France and the reckoning he makes with the horror that is war,” said Fraser. In The Wars, Robert Ross is just a young man from Toronto when he is sent off to become an officer in the First World War. As he encounters the harsh and gruesome reality that comes with the battlefield, he clings onto his hope for life. A key scene in The War that sticks with Fraser is distinctly a human moment where the Canadian soldier sees himself reflected back in the horses he decides to free. “He rips the lapels from his uniform and rides this herd of horses towards freedom as best he can, because he understood horses having come from … the innocence, the horses themselves, the poor creatures who were thrown into a struggle like this.” Finding the moments of humanity in narratives both in this world and out of it is what compels Fraser to keep going back to the mystical stories of his youth and to continue telling them as an actor today. Fraser returns to the screen, drumming up Oscar buzz once again, as an American actor in Rental Family, directed by Japanese filmmaker Hikari. As for a return to one of Fraser's earlier adventures, the fourth instalment in The Mummy franchise is underway, although a release date has yet to be confirmed. For now, you can listen to Fraser's animated voice in The Downloaded as he leads a "ragtag bunch of other creatures," through a Lord of the Flies-inspired journey. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bridget Raymundo is a multimedia journalist and producer currently working at CBC Books. You can reach her at bridget.raymundo@cbc.ca Related Stories Source: https://www.cbc.ca/books/thenextchapter/what-brendan-fraser-loves-about-a-classic-sci-fi-novel-9.6996711