In George of the Jungle, he wore a loincloth for most of the movie his muscles had muscles: “I look at myself then and I just see a walking steak.” The film eventually grossed $175 million. But though as the decade wore on he’d continue to take more traditional leading-man parts, he ultimately found most of his success with his shirt off. School Ties was marketed, correctly, as the launch of a new generation of leading men: the next Diner or Footloose or The Outsiders. And Fraser, who was bluff and hunky but also had acting chops, was for a while the film’s breakout discovery. (This was a natural part, minus the religious dynamics, for Fraser, who grew up in a happy but peripatetic family-his father had a job in Canada’s office of tourism-and enrolled in a new school practically every other year.) In 1992, he starred with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O’Donnell in the drama School Ties, as a Jewish scholarship quarterback fighting for his place at an elite, anti-Semitic boarding school. For much of the 1990s, Fraser spent a lot of time emerging wide-eyed from bomb shelters (Blast from the Past) or Canada (Dudley Do-Right) or the rain forest (George of the Jungle), but he also took on more serious roles. He had the unique quality of a man beholding the world for the first time, and directors began casting him as exactly that. In Encino Man, the film that helped turn him into a star, Fraser played a caveman recently freed from a block of ice in modern-day California he likes to joke, or simply recount, that his audition consisted of wordlessly wrestling a plant. He was big and handsome in a broad, unthreatening way, and most important, he was game. This would become an on-screen signature of Fraser’s: crashing into things.