Brendan Fraser Birth Chart

In March 2023, Brendan Fraser walked onto the stage of the 95th Academy Awards and accepted Best Actor for his work in The Whale, a performance directed by Darren Aronofsky that asked him to play a 600-pound English teacher trying to reconnect with his daughter in the week before his death. He cried, he stammered, he thanked the cast by name. Two decades earlier, a generation of moviegoers had watched the same man sprint through ruins in The Mummy and swing through vines in George of the Jungle, and the distance between those two performances — the comedy-adventure lead and the man accepting a statue for disappearing inside a prosthetic suit — is most of the story his chart has to tell.

Read as astrology, the distance isn't mysterious. It's what a chart like this is built to travel.

Fraser's Sun sits at 11°45' of Sagittarius, the mutable fire sign associated with big-picture meaning, foreign landscapes, and a belief that the next horizon holds the answer — a placement that tracks neatly with a childhood spent moving between Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States as his father worked for the Canadian Government Office of Tourism. Sagittarius Suns tend to treat identity the way they treat geography: as something you refresh by going somewhere new. Fraser's early career reads like a literal enactment of this — the Brazilian jungle of George of the Jungle, the Egyptian desert of The Mummy, the ice age of Encino Man.

But the Sun lives in his 8th house — the house of shared resources, debt, grief, other people's bodies, and what psychology calls integration of the shadow. That placement is the cost. Sagittarius wants the open road; the 8th house locks the door and hands you an inventory. Fraser's most acclaimed work has consistently required him to sit inside other people's pain — the dying teacher in The Whale, the grief-stricken father in The Quiet American, the investigator in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. His Sun is technically fire, but it burns through a water-ruled house, and the work that wins him awards is never the breezy kind.

What complicates this Sun further is the Taurus Moon sitting on his Ascendant, directly opposite the 8th-house Sagittarius energy. The Sun wants to light out for the territory; the Moon wants to stay home with a full refrigerator. That is a tension Fraser has described indirectly for years — the body that kept breaking down on the Mummy sets, the decision to step back from Hollywood in the 2000s, the long retreat before the return. His Sun says keep moving. His Moon says the body has limits you are going to have to respect.

The Moon at 29°41' Taurus, applying to the 2nd-house cusp, is one of the most physically legible placements in his chart. Taurus Moons need tangible comfort — food, weight, texture, the stability of the same couch — and when that Moon sits on the Ascendant, the body itself becomes the emotional register. You can read this Moon on Fraser's face. The softness after The Mummy, the visible weight changes between projects, the prosthetics in The Whale: his career has been unusually preoccupied with what a body looks like under pressure, and that is not an accident for a person whose feelings live in their skin.

The demand this Moon makes is relentless and unromantic. A Taurus Moon does not do acute crisis gracefully. It processes slowly, at the speed of the body, and it needs months or years — not days — to metabolize something hard. The multiple surgeries Fraser has described undergoing during his action-hero era, and the long stretch in the late 2000s and 2010s when he nearly disappeared from major studio releases, read less like a setback than a Taurus Moon refusing to be rushed. When Moons like this slow down, you do not speed them back up.

The complicating placement is Neptune at 26°49' Scorpio, sitting in his 7th house and opposing the Moon within three degrees. Neptune is the planet of dissolution, longing, and fog — and when it sits across from a physical Moon like this, the body is subject to forces it cannot always name. Taurus wants solidity. Neptune dissolves it. The chronic injuries, the reported struggles during the 2003 incident he detailed in a 2018 GQ interview involving the former HFPA president Philip Berk, the years of not being sure what had actually happened and what hadn't — that opposition is the astrological signature of a person whose stable body keeps being asked to metabolize experiences it was not built to name clearly. It is a costly aspect. It is also, arguably, the engine of his most searching performances.

The Ascendant — the sign rising on the eastern horizon at birth, the mask a person wears into a room — is Taurus at 8°06' for Fraser, which puts Venus as his chart ruler. A Taurus rising tends to read as calm, physically grounded, slightly sleepy around the eyes, and disarmingly warm. It is also a rising sign that produces a very specific career hazard: people assume you are simpler than you are. Fraser spent the Encino Man and George of the Jungle years being cast almost exclusively as the lovable dim guy, the himbo before the term existed, and a Taurus rising is part of why that read came so easily.

What this rising sign costs is typecasting. Taurus rising resists change on principle — it prefers the known couch — and Hollywood obliged by handing Fraser more of the same role until his 30s. The demand this placement makes is patience. You do not get to shake a Taurus-rising first impression quickly. You wait. You keep working. You let the body change. You let the voice drop. You accept that your comeback will arrive on a decade-long clock, not a year-long one.

The complication here is sharp: Fraser's Sun and Mercury both sit in Sagittarius in the 8th house, which is a thinking style that is anything but slow. Behind the sleepy Taurus mask is a mind that moves fast across big abstract terrain — foreign languages, philosophical questions, grief, transformation. The mismatch between the interior and the exterior is part of why his best late-career work lands so hard. When the Taurus rising finally cracks open, what emerges is the 8th-house Sagittarius that was always in there.

Fraser's Mercury at 9°57' Sagittarius sits right next to the Sun, which makes his thinking style and his core identity effectively fused — what he believes and what he is are the same document. This tight conjunction in the 8th house is why his interviews, when he opens up, tend to go somewhere uncomfortable fast. The 2018 GQ profile in which he publicly described the alleged 2003 assault was not a man performing vulnerability for a press cycle; it was a Sagittarius Mercury in the 8th house finally saying the thing that had been sitting in him for fifteen years. When this configuration speaks, it tells the whole truth or it says nothing at all.

Venus at 22°45' Capricorn, conjunct the Midheaven within a degree, is the placement most responsible for his public standing. Venus on the MC gives a person a face the public likes — stability, warmth, a kind of earned sweetness — and in Capricorn it does that work through long tenure rather than flash. This is why Fraser's comeback narrative landed with the cultural force it did. Capricorn Venus does not get adored overnight. It gets respected over decades, and then one day a room stands up.

Mars at 14°47' Libra in the 6th house is the interesting complication. Libra Mars fights through diplomacy and negotiation rather than direct confrontation, and in the 6th house of routine, craft, and service, it expresses through the dailiness of the work — showing up, doing the reps, collaborating. What it does not do well is protect itself. Libra Mars often takes too long to say no, and when combined with the 6th-house pattern of service, it is the aspect of a person who will over-commit to a project and then discover, belatedly, that the project has cost them more than they agreed to spend.

This is the chart's structural fault line. Mars in Libra in the 6th house opposing Saturn retrograde at 18°58' Aries in the 12th house is the aspect of a person whose drive runs straight into a wall of self-limitation. The 6th/12th axis is the axis of work versus withdrawal, service versus seclusion — and Fraser's Mars/Saturn opposition has played out across his career as cycles of intense physical labor followed by near-total retreat. You can see it in the sequence: peak action-hero output in the early 2000s, then a near-decade of smaller projects, quiet years, surgeries. The opposition does not prevent achievement. It prevents sustained momentum without a price.

The Moon on the Ascendant opposing Neptune in the 7th is the aspect of a person whose emotional reality keeps being destabilized by other people. In the 7th house — the house of open enemies, partnerships, and the public — Neptune dissolves the boundary between what is happening to you and what you are imagining. Taurus Moons need solid ground to feel safe; Neptune opposite Taurus pulls the ground out from under them through other people's behavior, words, or projections. The cost of this aspect is a lifetime of having to work unusually hard to trust one's own reading of a situation, particularly situations involving power asymmetry. Marisa Tomei, another Sagittarius Sun with a history of playing characters whose emotional lives resist simple reading, offers an interesting comparison point — but in Fraser's case the Neptune opposition makes the challenge more acute, not less.

Saturn retrograde in Aries in the 12th is the chart's deepest shadow placement. The 12th house is the house of what is hidden — institutional forces, unseen systems, things done behind closed doors — and Saturn there often shows up as a person who has to build their authority in private before it becomes visible in public. Retrograde intensifies this: the structures Fraser has had to build are internal first, external second. This is the placement that mapped onto his reported 2003 experience with the HFPA with uncomfortable precision — Saturn retrograde in the 12th is frequently the chart signature of a person whose career is shaped, for a long time, by something that happened to them behind closed doors that they could not publicly name.

The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction at 2°41' Libra and 3°25' Libra (orb 0°44') in the 6th house is the chart's engine of reinvention inside the work itself — Jupiter expands whatever it touches, Uranus disrupts whatever it touches, and in the house of craft and routine they produce a person whose career will have sudden genre-shifts that look, in retrospect, like logical expansions. The shift from George of the Jungle to Gods and Monsters to The Whale is exactly what this aspect produces: not reinvention for its own sake, but craft expanding into new rooms.

Venus trine Pluto (orb 2°19') is the late-career beauty aspect — Venus in earth signs trine Pluto in earth signs is a configuration that tends to deepen, not diminish, with age, and it correlates with the cultural recognition of The Whale arriving in his fifties rather than his twenties.

And the Moon-Jupiter trine in earth signs (orb 3°) is the buffer placement — the aspect that makes the heaviness of the rest of the chart metabolizable. Without it, this chart would be grinding. With it, the grinding produces growth.

Fraser's Venus-MC conjunction in Capricorn promises exactly the career he has built: slow, earned, ultimately respected. What the chart does not promise — and this is where the tension lives — is a career without long fallow periods. Capricorn MC is the signature of people whose peaks arrive late, after the structure has been tested. Jeremy Strong's chart offers a parallel here: Capricorn on the career angle produces performers whose recognition arrives through labor that looks almost punishing from the outside. Fraser's trajectory fits the pattern — the early franchise years funded the late artistic ones, not the other way around.

The tension the chart sets up and the career required is the 8th-house Sun. A Capricorn MC could have played its Hollywood cards more conservatively — fewer roles about dying, grieving, disappearing, less of the emotional heavy lifting. But the 8th-house Sun does not let a person stay in the comfortable Capricorn lane. It keeps asking the career to touch the rawer material, even when the rawer material costs something. The reported 2026 revival of The Mummy with John Hannah and Rachel Weisz returning is, in this sense, the Capricorn MC doing its job: returning to the reliable franchise after the 8th-house detour has finally paid off.

Fraser's 7th house is ruled by Pluto and holds Neptune — a partnership signature that suggests relationships that dissolve and reform, rather than the clean commitments of an air-ruled 7th. Venus in Capricorn provides a stabilizing counterweight: his romantic style tends toward the traditional, the committed, the long-tenured. The trade-off the chart sets up is between the Capricorn Venus wanting a stable partnership of equals and the Neptune-in-7th pattern of partnerships that keep shifting shape over time. This is a person whose relational life will work best when there is both real structure and real room to let partners be more than one thing.

Saturn ingressed into Aries in May 2025, retrograded back into Pisces in September 2025, and re-entered Aries in February 2026, where it will remain for most of the next two years. For Fraser — whose natal Saturn sits at 18°58' Aries in the 12th — this means his Saturn return, the roughly 29-year cycle when Saturn completes its first orbit and forces a reckoning with the structures you have built, arrives in mid-to-late 2026 as transiting Saturn reaches that 18° point.

What makes this particular Saturn return unusually loaded is the house it happens in. The 12th house is the house of what is hidden, of institutional forces, of unresolved material that has been metabolized privately for years. Saturn returns in the 12th are frequently the moments when a person's long-buried material either gets formally acknowledged or gets permanently sealed. In Fraser's case, the timing is almost too on the nose: the Saturn return lands in the same window as the reported Mummy 4 revival, the first time he will return to the franchise that defined his pre-withdrawal career after the publicly acknowledged years of reckoning with what that era cost him.

Saturn returns do not predict outcomes. What they predict is that the architecture will be tested. For Fraser, the test in 2026 looks like this: can the structure he has built in the second act — the Aronofsky work, the awards recognition, the slow comeback — hold the weight of re-entering the first act's franchise? The 12th-house Saturn return tends to answer that question not through external events but through internal ones: whether the person feels, from the inside, that the private work has become solid enough to bear public return. Watch how he talks about the Mummy 4 promotional cycle, not what the reviews say.

The honest reading of Brendan Fraser's chart is that it was never built for a smooth career. The Mars-Saturn opposition puts a price on every sustained push. The Moon-Neptune opposition means the ground will keep shifting under him, particularly through other people. The Saturn-in-12th placement suggests that long stretches of his professional life will be shaped by material he cannot publicly name until he is ready, and that readiness runs on a clock he does not control. What the chart also contains — and this is the part that makes the reading honest rather than bleak — is a Venus-MC conjunction in Capricorn that promises the long arc pays off, an 8th-house Sun that is genuinely at home in difficult emotional terrain, and a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in the 6th house that keeps finding new rooms for the craft to expand into. The chart's bargain is steep: you will not get the breezy career your Sagittarius Sun wants. What you will get, if you are willing to stay in the work through the Mars-Saturn cycles and the 12th-house retreats, is a body of late-career work that the 22-year-old version of you could not have made. Fraser's 2023 Oscar win is the contract coming due. His 2026 Saturn return is the question of whether the contract renews. Read this way, the comeback narrative the culture likes to tell about him is not wrong — it is just thinner than what is actually in the chart. The chart is asking him to build something, in private, that can survive the return to public view.

Jake Gyllenhaal's chart carries a similar Sagittarius-Sun-meets-heavy-chart pattern, and Richard Gadd's walks a related Taurus trajectory through much harder autobiographical material. Fraser's chart belongs to that family — performers whose best work sits uncomfortably close to their own life.

This profile is built from a Swiss Ephemeris calculation of Brendan Fraser's natal chart using the Kerykeion library, based on the Rodden Rating AA birth data (birth certificate) recorded in the Astro-Databank entry. All planetary positions, house cusps, and aspect orbs cited in this article come directly from that calculation and have not been approximated or hand-adjusted. Biographical claims are anchored to publicly available sources, primarily the Wikipedia entries for Fraser and the specific films and events referenced. Transit timing for the Saturn return is calculated from the same ephemeris.