Brendan Fraser gets cryogenically frozen and creates a universe with his voice in a new audio drama

Talking to Brendan Fraser feels like catching up with an old friend — he's warm, friendly, and very Canadian (read: incredibly nice). Despite it being a virtual conversation, it felt like we were chatting in the same room, sitting by the fire as he told stories about his life and career. And that's exactly what he wanted to channel in his newest project: the lead role in the Canadian Audible Original audio drama The Downloaded.

The Downloaded, an adaptation of Robert J. Sawyer novel, follows two vastly different groups of people in 2059 portrayed by the compelling trio of Fraser, who's playing a convicted murderer named Roscoe Koudoulian; Luke Kirby, who plays an astronaut named Dr. Jurgen Haas; and Vanessa Sears, who plays Captain Letitia Garvey. While their bodies are frozen, their minds — still active and awake — are uploaded into a massive quantum computer. But when "a global cataclysm devastates most of the Earth," their cryosleep is accidentally extended by over 500 years and they wake up to find everything's changed. 

The 54-year-old Canadian-American actor recently made a grand Hollywood comeback with the lead role in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, which won him the Oscar for Best Actor earlier this year. He can also be seen in Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, in theatres now. Fraser's return has been warmly received by fans and critics alike. The actor says he simply wants to be a part of projects he cares about and to tell stories that people want to see and hear.

With this latest Audible.ca entry, the power of audio drama is not lost on him. He says his belief in the spoken word goes back to his childhood, when he lived in Europe and listened to radio plays. ("It made a lasting impression on me," he says.)

Due to the current SAG-AFTRA strike, Fraser can't speak about his other film projects, but we caught up about his role as a voice performer, his Canadian heritage, and what he'd like to see the next phase of his career look like. 

With this being your first Canadian Audible Original, what drew you to this project, particularly the medium of audio storytelling?

I think it's the same thing as ever — it's just good storytelling. It's infinitely plausible, given our high-tech world now. Honestly, Marriska, I don't know about you, but would you bat an eye if someone said, "Hey, you can get your consciousness downloaded and you can freeze it, and you can fire it out in whatever amount of time later on, and you'll still have lived your life, although very little time has passed between the two events?" It almost seems like this story, which is essentially a time travel story in pursuit of finding a utopia, is something that's fantastical, because it's science fiction, but also infinitely relatable.

I know that it's rewarding to give a performance on a project that has an intimacy to it just because of the format. Audible does fantastic work and I particularly like the way that The Downloaded is sound engineered. It really transports the listener to a room, really being in the place at the time where these events transpire, and it does it with such conviction. [When] you look at the project overall, it's like sitting around reading stories to one another.

The spoken word has real resonance and power to it. I've always loved hearing radio plays and presentations. When I was a kid, I lived in Europe in the '70s and I started listening to a lot of radio plays around that time and it made a lasting impression on me. So it's great fun to be a part of a project like this.

When you're voicing an audiobook, and all you've got is the tone of your voice to carry the whole thing, how different is that for you as a performer? Do you have the same process as an actor?

I met voice actors over the years — many of them worked in animation — and they're usually really unique personalities. They're just so creative and inventive. But one thing that seems consistent is you're able to create universes with just your voice and with a microphone.

It really distils the medium down to the performer, even more so than on something that incorporates the visuals of a television show or a film because it's incumbent on the listener to have their imagination inspired to create the story, and that's the fun of it. It really kind of put me in the driver's seat of how the story gets told.

If every character is a little bit of the actor who plays him, how much of yourself do you see Roscoe, and what was so far removed from you that you needed to reconcile with a character like him? 

The conceit is that he's done something morally reprehensible as a crime in the contemporary world. He starts off around the year 2050, and for his crime, he is given an option to play out the sentence in a sort of cryogenic state, which will seem like very little time has passed, but in reality, a great deal of time transpires. But of course, because this is science fiction and some inciting incident or nuisance has to happen, everything goes wrong. And oops, he's been transported almost 500 years into the future because he's been frozen, so to speak, for that long.

What does the world look like when you regain consciousness? That's where the story really lives. Who's in charge here? Are we pursuing this perfect world? Is that even possible? Students of Aldous Huxley will probably say, "No, Brave New World proved that utopias fail." Knowing that, what are we going to do to rule this new society? And really, who is in charge anyway?

I think the most important thing to do is to take extraordinary circumstances like that in any story, and find a way to connect with them as personally as you can in an ordinary way. Like, what is very important to Roscoe? Well, he has a daughter. As a parent, naturally, he's going to want to be reunited with her. But too much time has passed and the mind-bending logarithm that would go into trying to understand who her descendants are is just absolutely perplexing.

Personally, this stuff is nightmares for me, because I do not want to be cryogenically frozen, thank you very much. (laughs) But this Roscoe fella has opted for it, because he thought, "Well, maybe I can cut some corners here on this sentence." But everything goes wrong. He has to learn how, along with his compatriots, to survive in this new world.

You have been candid about your life as a father and your changing career perspective. So I did see a bit of a throughline with Roscoe and his daughter being his lifeline. Did you think about those parallels?

I thought about it without needing to think about it — because what I've learned so far, in my journey of being a parent, is all of that just sort of automatically exists or becomes something that's more important to you. You have to have a kid in order to appreciate it; that is what I learned. And once you do, everything you thought you knew is different. I can identify with that for sure.

You have had the opportunity to reinvent and reintroduce yourself to the industry. How would you like to see the next phase of your career go in terms of the kinds of roles or genres you'd like to do as an artist?

Well, the simple answer is, I want to be a part of work that people actually want to see, want to invest in. There's nothing but content available to us. Maybe less of it in light of current labour issues in the industry, but I think that I want to be a part of projects that I care about.

Not that I didn't care about work that I did before. You have to find some reason to really want to be there, and if you don't, it's going to be written on your forehead. So I'm keen to get behind whatever it is that an author or a writer has to say, and how I can identify with that myself.

In the audiobook, Roscoe is put through the VR recreation simulation of the crime where he has to relive the same day over and over again. Which day would you want to revisit over and over had you been a part of that simulation? 

The birth of my kids. The rest is just noise. But those ones were important. 

This is your first Canadian Audible.ca project. Do you feel more Canadian doing projects like this?

It's the left half, or maybe it's the right half of me that's Canadian. The upper half or the lower half? I can't remember. I'm Canadian enough. But I'm born of Canadian parents. Although I was born in the United States, for huge swathes of my life, I always identified as a Canadian. I have had the sensibility at times that I'm kind of sitting on the fence with dual citizenship, but my heritage goes back to the North-West Mounted Police who became the RCMP. I'm the grandson of coal miners from the Maritimes. I have always felt great pride in the Crimson.

My father's work was with Tourism Canada, so our family traveled early on in the family history. I went to an international school as a kid, so diversity was the order of the day, for sure. And to meet people from everywhere around the world, it always felt comforting to me to know that somehow being Canadian meant that I had a friend no matter where I went.

So what would you say is the most Canadian characteristic of Brendan Fraser?

Humility. (laughs) Self-aggrandization. 

I definitely see that. (laughs) What does being a performer mean to you today and what does the rest of your career look like? 

That's to be told. I'm hopeful for exciting things. We live in a time right now in media and entertainment where anything's possible, so the bar gets raised for audiences to constantly be impressed and re-impressed and one-upped and shown something new and interesting. And there's got to come a point where that becomes exhausting trying to be so innovative all the time. And I think the answer is: get back to the basics.

We just need to tell stories that are good. When doing a project for audio like this, it's the same thing. Storytelling is in our imagination and millennia old. We can imagine that people sat around a campfire talking about how their day went or if a herd of animals had shown up and you need to hunt them or there was a good harvest… whatever it was, you need to get back to just speaking to one another about things that we can all identify with, no matter how fantastical or even implausible they may seem.

That's the beauty of science fiction — we're telling stories in the future with technologies that don't exist, to just remind us of how very human and normal we are without any of that.