The actor is tipped for awards success for his comeback performance in The Whale, in which he plays a morbidly obese literature professor. (Read our full review of The Whale). He is currently the bookmakers’ favourite to win Best Actor at the Oscars.
In 2018, Fraser said Philip Berk, head of Golden Globes organising body the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), had groped his bottom in 2003.
Brendan Fraser in The Whale
The HFPA did find that Mr Berk had “inappropriately touched” Fraser, but ruled that it “was intended to be taken as a joke and not as a sexual advance.”
Fraser revealed the incident “made me retreat” and “feel reclusive.”
“I felt ill,” the actor said in 2018. “I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry.”
When asked if he would attend next year’s Golden Globes in a new interview with GQ, Fraser said: “I have more history with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association than I have respect for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. No, I will not participate.
“It’s because of the history that I have with them. And my mother didn’t raise a hypocrite. You can call me a lot of things, but not that.”
The 2003 groping incident happened at an event at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fraser previously told GQ that he’d felt Mr Berk’s finger as he started “moving it around”.
Fraser demanded and received an apology, but Berk said to GQ in 2018: “My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual, ‘If I’ve done anything that upset Mr Fraser, it was not intended and I apologise.”
Former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk speaking in 2010
Berk told GQ he had faced no disciplinary action as a result of the incident. He was eventually expelled from the HFPA in 2021, after he shared an article which described Black Lives Matter as a “racist hate group”.
In the lastest GQ interview, Fraser explains: “I knew they would close ranks. I knew they would kick the can down the road. I knew they would get ahead of the story. I knew that I certainly had no future with that system as it was.”
The Golden Globes are returning to television in January, after the 2022 ceremony was dropped by the broadcaster NBC due to controversies surrounding racism, sexism and conflicts of interest.
