The famous hanging scene from 1999’s The Mummy apparently got a lot realer than anyone on-set was expecting it to. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly for a 20th anniversary retrospective in 2019, Brendan Fraser revealed that he got fully choked out during the sequence in question. From his recollection, director Stephen Sommers was trying to get the close-up shot of Fraser’s character being hanged just right and asked him to sell it a bit more. For the final take, Fraser did his best to make it look realistic, and that’s when things went left.
Fraser went on to explain that he was standing on his tippy toes in the shot, but the person holding the rope pulled it up higher than before, leaving him with very little wiggle room. “And then the next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, and there was gravel in my teeth, and everyone was really quiet,” Fraser told Kelly Clarkson in 2023. He also compared the experience to the Death Star from Star Wars powering down. Fraser awoke shortly thereafter to one of the EMTs saying his name and welcoming him to “the club”—as he soon learned, the same thing had happened to Mel Gibson on the set of Braveheart.
One of The Mummy’s Most Famous Scenes Accidentally Choked Brendan Fraser Unconscious
For his part, Sommers placed the blame entirely on Fraser, saying that Fraser was the one who tightened the noose and went to great lengths to try and get an authentic-looking take. Fraser responded by admitting that the accident was technically his fault, because he’d chosen to follow Sommers’s direction. However, Fraser did acknowledge that he made the mistake of taking three really deep breaths before the camera landed on him, causing his face to turn purple and his veins to pop out of his neck. “So, you know what? In me pointing fingers at Stephen, and vice versa, you got me on that point,” he conceded.
Despite the near-fatal incident, the footage that was captured as it was happening still made its way into the final cut of the film—right up until Fraser actually lost consciousness, of course. It should also be noted that while Fraser and Sommers disagree on the specifics of what happened during that scene, the two remain friends and have collaborated twice since then. They linked up again for the 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns, as well as 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
You can check out the hanging sequence as it appeared in The Mummy right here:
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