Brendan Fraser Recalls ‘Scary’ Fully Nude Scene With Matt Damon in ‘School Ties’

He’s currently getting critical acclaim for his performance in “The Whale,” but Brendan Fraser’s first role was in “School Ties,” and he had to strip naked.

Fraser played David in the 1992 film about a Jewish boy attending prep school among an army of anti-Semitic classmates.

In the film, tensions between Fraser’s character and Matt Damon’s Charlie come to a head when the young boys face off in the shower.

Fraser confirmed that he was completely naked during the scene and that filming was not easy. “It was scary. It’s scary to do that,” he revealed on “The Howard Stern Show.”

“When you’re an actor and you’re just starting out, you’re ambitious and play for just about anything. They say, ‘jump’, you say ‘how high?’ But at the same time, I understood that it wasn’t really for the wow or a scintillating ‘hey look at that, naked people’ factor,” he said of the scene. “The goal was that when Damon’s character says what he says about David, it just reveals who he is.”

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“His anti-Semitism and prejudice is exposed and it’s ugly,” he said of Damon’s character. “And the door is locked and they fight over it like shaved apes that have to be separated, because they have nothing more to say to each other and it turns into an ugly fist attack. And that’s the point off the stage, really.”

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Looking back, Fraser admitted he could relate to his character wanting to be seen.

“Doing ‘School Ties’, in a way, I felt like David because his — his story is that he wants to belong… At one point in our lives or another, we’ve all felt like to have our noses pinched against the glass and there’s something keeping us out and we want to be a part of what’s in there. In this case, David wanted to be a part of that school. He wanted the camaraderie… He wanted the glory that sport brought him. all this needing to want to belong, I identified with that because I felt like I wanted to be part of this Hollywood, too.”

Matt Damon, left, and Brendan Fraser played Charlie Dillon and David Green, respectively, in “School Ties.” (Paramount Pictures courtesy Everett Collection)

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In honor of the film’s 20th anniversary last fall, director Robert Mandel spoke about the film’s impact and the infamous shower scene.

“The shower scene is a pretty big scene for these guys who have never been on camera before. This scene, although written in the script, was not covered in the test. It was: you’re on set and you do it at a certain point in the movie when everyone’s very cohesive… But you always ask, and you always want them to do it. were, they were good at it,” Mandel told Yahoo Entertainment of Fraser and Damon.

Mandel, who thinks the scene had an impact “for each of them,” said the shooting of the scene was professional.

“You close the board and you do what you have to do.”

Brendan Fraser recalls auditioning twice for the movie “School Ties.” (Noam Galai/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

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Fraser, who said he auditioned for the film twice after being rejected by the film’s original director, recalled reading for the role of David with Damon.

“Matt Damon was my stage partner… He already has the job… You know, this is my picture here and I’m going ‘Okay, don’t ruin it… Cut it down a size.’ I was used to being on stage at this point in my life and playing back row, and I knew I had to level the playing field with Matt…I felt like…I was his wingman, or something like that. And I think that’s why I was hired,” he admitted.