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The Mummy star Brendan Fraser reveals that the Three Stooges eye poke was improvised
One of the most iconic (and funniest) moments from The Mummy was a Brendan Fraser improvisation

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Did you know that one of the most iconic moments from the 1999 Mummy film wasn’t in the original script? There’s a scene in the film where Rick O’Connell is battling a mummy and pokes the undead creature in the eye sockets with both fingers. The mummy was eyeless, so the strike didn’t do much to slow it down, but the audience loved it. The moment, which was inspired by The Three Stooges, was something Brendan Fraser came up with on the day they filmed.
“I was fighting an imaginary half-mummy, because the CG put it in later,” Brendan Fraser says during a Mummy spotlight panel at Emerald City Comic Con 2022. “I had a brilliant idea on the day we were doing it. We’re fighting and he’s there, and what if I poked him in the eyes like The Three Stooges? They’re like, ‘Try it.’ It was like revolutionary.”
“So, there’s me, fighting the half-Stooge eyeless mummy, and he’s bouncing around like a sock monkey behind me. It’s a leap of faith when you make movies like this. You got to believe what you’re doing or nobody else will.”
For more on The Mummy, watch the complete panel video below:
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