Brendan Fraser Is Still Frustrated Over His Monkey Co-Star From George Of The Jungle
Co-workers can be frustrating. Add the ego that comes with the world of celebrity and it's inevitable that people are going to butt heads. Sometimes, those heads are going to be wildly different sizes. Sometimes, those butts are going to be in tiny diapers because it's surprisingly hard to housetrain a monkey. Let's backtrack a little.
It was 1997 when "George of the Jungle" came swinging into theaters and, unavoidably, that tree. Starring Brendan Fraser in the title role, the film was funkier than you might remember. The fourth wall got sledgehammered at the top of act one, and the narrator would stop the bad guys out of spite. John Cleese sang Frank Sinatra as a gorilla and a CGI elephant played fetch with a log and chewed on a giant milk bone. If there's one thing that movie had a lot of, it was a willingness to take giant swings.
And if there's a second thing that movie had, it was a menagerie of live animals –- lions, elephants, and toucans, to name a few. And then there was the monkey. The capuchin monkey.
Brendan Fraser really didn't like that monkey.
You're done in this town, monkey
The story comes to us via an interview on the Graham Norton Show, where it was revealed that the monkey recently seen in "The Fabelmans" was the same monkey used to shoot "George of the Jungle," which Norton claimed was the tiny primate's first acting gig. "It was THAT..." Fraser started, before getting into some very adult language.
In fairness, it sounds like the beef was legitimate. "She had a boyfriend called Mr. Binks who's who I normally worked with," Fraser recalled. "Mr. Binks would throw a fit and disappear into the rafters if he didn't get the take that he wanted."
"Because Mr. Binks was a boy monkey, he had to wear a boy bikini," the actor continued. "He would get frustrated occasionally and rip it off and disappear into the ceiling –- this is late-night television, right?" After being assured that it was, the "The Whale" star described what Mr. Binks would do. It would be difficult to recount politely. Basically, it makes a lot of sense that monkeys have hairy palms.
As the world spins forward into what appears to be an unflappable Brennaissance, it's nice to know that, however soft-spoken, no one is perfect. Almost anyone, from the Hollywood elite to humble street sweepers, still get mad when their multimillion-dollar movie has to pause production every time a monkey starts giving itself a low-five 15 feet above their heads.