BRENDAN FRASER first made a name for himself five years ago, playing a defrosted caveman opposite Pauly Shore in Encino Man. Today, he's once again starring as a semi-evolved hominid, but this one has a loftier pedigree. It's George of the Jungle, the title character of the new Disney live-action comedy feature, based on the accident-prone hero of the late-sixties TV cartoon, which in turn is a parody of nearly every Tarzan film ever made.

Fraser's dramatic range extends beyond these primitive roles: he's also played thoughtful, tweedy characters, notably in School Ties and With Honors. In person, he goes to great lengths to resemble these fellows (prep-school grads, like himself) rather than the low-browed guys from Encino Man and George of the Jungle. Not only can the classically trained actor quote chapter and verse from the George cartoon series, he is capable of sprinkling any discussion--on the mythological underpinnings of Tarzan, for example--with large, impressive words.

It's no wonder Fraser was recently asked to host American Movie Classics' Tarzan movie retrospective. Capitalizing on an old series whose theme song was literally drummed into the heads of millions, Disney has fashioned a film with plenty of mainstream appeal: slapstick for the kids (George slams into a tree about once every seven minutes) and some of the slyer humor that gave Jay (Rocky and Bullwinkle) Ward's original series its adult appeal. As on the show, George is mentored by a talking ape named Ape, and he pals around with an elephant named Shep. George, who has sustained more than his share of blows to the head, thinks Shep is a very large dog.

Though he's shown a fondness for evolutionarily challenged characters--rent Airheads for still another example--Fraser, twenty-nine, is not afraid to tackle more nuanced roles on occasion. He recently appeared as an angry gay man in Showtime's Twilight of the Golds, and he'll play the muse of 1930s Hollywood horror-film director James Whale (Ian McKellen) in the upcoming drama Gods and Monsters. For now, he's swinging his way through the broad comedy mainstream, and there seem to be few trees looming in his path as one of Hollywood's in-demand young actors.

Interview

You once said, "I've got to get away from the image of Encino Man." Yet you seem to be getting back to that with George of the Jungle.

I don't necessarily remember saying that. If I did, I may have . . . well, it was back in 1992, around the time that School Ties came out. Well, it's been five years since then, my friend, and I . . . well, I maintain that these are obviously separate, individual characters. There's obviously a sense of play and newfound joy that I approached playing them with. Both are really good roles.

You campaigned to play this role. Why did you feel so strongly about it?

Having read the screenplay and broken a blood vessel laughing out loud, I knew it was a good screenplay for a fun film.

How difficult was it to play a cartoon character without being too cartoonish?

Challenge is certainly something I'm always up for. Not knowing exactly how to play a cartoon character, and being given the world of a live-action feature to live in, I guess that was my job, to sort of split the difference and borrow from the energy of an animated short and apply that to a real, three-dimensional person, give him a soul, and make him a human being. And at the same time, be able to swing around out of control, smash into things, have talking apes populating a magical jungle kingdom that's descended upon by evil, bungling poachers, and ending up with all manner of jungle creatures.

Do you enjoy doing physical comedy?

It's clearly a favorite form of mine. My heroes have always been Rowan Atkinson and Bill Irwin and, gosh, David Shiner, Benny Hill.

The Three Stooges?

I think the Three Stooges were sometimes unfocused, but a lot of fun at the same time. I think that there's always a lot more to be said with fewer words, very often.

How did you know going in that the script you enjoyed wouldn't result in a finished comedy so broad that it could be a career-killer? Were you worried about that?

No, no. I'm not necessarily looking at this so much as a career-killer or -liver. I'm more interested in the living and making the best film I possibly could. Every screenplay is obviously going to go through numbers of changes and rewritten scenes, and the final edit could be vastly different from the vision that was once shared. I'm personally in love with that process, and as I know that I will be making films for the rest of my life, I look upon each undertaking as a new experience, to help ultimately perform the next one. Did I answer your question?

Sure, you did. So, anyway, how did you get in shape to play George?

I'd stay fit. I spent probably a couple of months before we began lifting weights, eating protein, low carbohydrates, fistfuls of cement. I figured as I was asked to play a cartoon character, I needed to embody the ability to make real strong physical choices, and back them up with the spirit of the cartoon that Jay Ward presented us with in the sixties.

You were really into the idea of George of the Jungle; a real fan?

Oh, yeah. I loved the cartoon as a kid, and who can forget the theme song? Going, "Boom, boom, boom-boom-ba-boom-boom," it seems like it's in most everyone's cultural osmosis or something like that. I've always been friendly with the Tarzan films and definitely interested in the mythology of Edgar Rice Burroughs' enduring character, Tarzan of the Apes.

What, in your opinion, is the enduring attraction of the Tarzan character?

I think that the quality of the character of Tarzan has to do with its basis in mythology. If you look at the lore, it's essentially The Odyssey: a character is transported to a netherworld by some conveyance--in this case, it's a "big silver bird come from sky." He's stranded there, must rise to power--in this case, among a brood of apes. He deposes an evil leader, encounters a woman, loses her by some mistake or by her abduction, must retrieve her, delving deeper into the jungle or netherworld, and to retrieve her, return home, but not in glory to encounter his worst foe, which turns out to be, of course, humanity. To overcome that foe is probably the enduring essence of the myth, and that's been a popular theme in films, so far as I know them. And he's rewarded warmly with a jungle wedding.

Did you do your own swinging in the movie?

A great deal of it. When you saw me, that was me. Those effects were created by our wire-effects aerial crew. They were able to transport a human being safely from point A to B. Me, mainly.

Did you have a harness?

Yeah, typically, but at the end of it--I white-knuckled it, basically. I took my own body weight. That was just a safety thing, a thin strap of nylon webbing between me and certain doom. It kept you on your toes. It's good fun.

What about hitting the trees? Were there tree cushions?

Sometimes there was padding. You could cheat the angle. I think, if I ever hit anything, it was never really more than about seven or five feet away. Ask the stunt double. He'll give you a different answer. He was great--Joey Preston, who, by the way, I think, created George, not just as a stunt man per se would, but he's an actor and an acrobat and an all-around good guy and definitely an inspiration for me to play George. As were the monkeys, as was the whole world of it all, as was the cartoon.

Were you worried about being upstaged by the animals, the stunts, the computer graphics, or the special effects in George?

I think that Binks [the Capuchin monkey] and Tai [the elephant] stole the film in the best way possible. I believe that Tai turned in a positively transformational performance as a dog. Binks reached the depths of pathos, I believe, feeling shunned by her peers. And the animals definitely kept me on my toes. Obviously, you never know what they're going to do. I like that. I think they're great little actors. Big actors, come to think of it.

Are you familiar with the "Brendan Fraser Shrine" on the World Wide Web? I guess you haven't seen it, judging from your face.

Wow! Really? Give me the address.

The idea of the site is that you have priestesses, and they're trying to write a script for you.

Well, good. Gee, I'm flattered.

They have reviews of all your films. There's split opinion on The Passion of Darkly Noon.

It's not for everyone. It's definitely an art film. Speaking of art films, I know we're running out of time, but I want to make sure I plug my next endeavor, which is a drama with Sir Ian McKellen and Lynn Redgrave on a project called Gods and Monsters, based on Christopher Bram's The Father of Frankenstein. I'm playing James Whale's muse. James Whale was the director in the thirties who directed Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and about twenty other films, some of them based thematically on the atrocity of war. I'm an ex-Marine who is his dark muse along his journey of recollections, as he has had a seizure which has debilitated him to such a point that he can only paint and draw. So he invites me into his parlor, much in the same way that, let's say, the spider did to the fly. It's a drama.

Did you enjoy your stint as AMC's host of the recent Tarzan series?

I did, immensely. It was an honor. I had the opportunity to see a few lost films that they sent me.

Did you watch every one of them?

I wish I'd physically had enough eyeballs and the time to do that. But there were over eighty films made, and we hosted thirty-six of them, I believe. A favorite of mine, definitely, was the first one that was made. That was Tarzan the Ape Man, starring Elmo Lincoln, who was, I believe, a shipyard worker, and he had a beer belly.

So here I am blathering on about the legend of the White Ape. But it's definitely source material for Jay Ward, who probably started asking a lot of questions about, "Why doesn't this guy ever smash into a tree?" which is, of course, the signature movement that George executes, much to the amusement of his ape friends, and la di da.