The Mummy was a smash hit movie when it first came out in 1999.
Combining action, history, and death-defying stunts, the flick starred Brendan Fraser as an adventurer who searches for an ancient city - and accidentally wakes up a centuries-old mummy.
However, what many people don't know is that Fraser almost faced death himself to make the movie. In a resurfaced interview, the actor described how he nearly lost his life when a stunt went wrong.
Fraser explained to Entertainment Weekly back in 2019 that he was filming a scene in which his character is hanged when the near-fatal accident occurred.
"Rick is dangling at the end of the rope, and he’s such a tough guy that his neck didn’t snap," he said, before describing how when they did the close-up shot of his face: "I did get fully choked out. It was scary."
The actor recalled that things got dangerous on set when director Stephen Sommers asked to do one more take with the tension on the rope tightened. However, when they did, it wasn't long before Fraser lost consciousness.
"The stuntman took up the tension on the rope," he said. "And I went up on the balls of my feet, then I guess he took the tension up again, and I’m not a ballerina, I can’t stand on my tip-toes. I remember seeing the camera start to pan around, and then it was like a black iris at the end of a silent film."
When Fraser regained consciousness, an Emergency Medical Technician was on hand to check he was alright - though his jokey manner was not appreciated by the actor, who asked if he could go home for the day to recover.
However, Sommers had different ideas. Fraser recalls that they disagreed over the incident, saying: I think he was trying to go, 'Oh, that wacky Brendan, acting up a storm again!', or something like that."
Meanwhile, the director gave EW his own version of the event, saying that the actor was "trying to make it look like it’s really strangling him" and that "he did it to himself".
Fraser hit back that, if he did knock himself out, it was only because he was trying to give the best performance he could. "I was doing my job to look like a man dangling by his neck about to die. I got to say, what you see in the movie is the take that they did, so they had to cut away, because moments later, I was out of it," he told the outlet.
Despite disagreeing with Sommers over the incident, Fraser did work with him again on the smash hit sequel The Mummy Returns (2001).
