Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Actor on 12 March 2023, for his performance in The Whale. Among the people who were not remotely surprised that he deserved it was Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has been his friend for fifteen years and has spent much of that time saying so publicly.
The two met on the set of The Air I Breathe in 2007, a drama that also featured Forest Whitaker, Andy Garcia, and Kevin Bacon. By Gellar’s account, the friendship was immediate and has sustained through everything that followed — including the years when Fraser’s career went through the kind of period that Hollywood does not tend to support its people through particularly well, and the period after 2018 when he came forward about the sexual assault he had experienced and the ways it had affected his career.
In January, Gellar was given the opportunity to present Fraser with the American Riviera Award for outstanding achievement in film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. She took the stage and said what she has been saying for years: “I’ve been fortunate to have Brendan as a friend for 15 years. When I watched his performances, he made me want to become a better actor. But then I got to meet him and know him, and he makes me a better person.” She told the room: “Brendan, you’re a gift.”
When the Oscar was announced, Gellar posted to Instagram with a photograph of the two of them and the caption: “If it was up to me, he would win all the awards.” She later confirmed she had “ugly cried.”
Fraser’s Oscar night was widely observed to be one of the more genuinely emotional moments in recent Academy Awards history — the room was with him in a way that rooms are not always with comeback stories, perhaps because this particular comeback had taken so long and cost so much. Gellar was not in the auditorium, but she was clearly watching.
Fifteen years of friendship. It is, as she said, a gift.
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