It's been seven years since Brendan Fraser stepped into the boots of Rick O'Connell in The Mummy franchise. Now Fraser is looking to the Far East for adventure as director Rob Cohen takes the reigns on The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which hits theaters this summer on August 1. This time around, Fraser jumps into action with Maria Bello and Luke Ford to dig up the mummy of the first Emperor of Qin, a shape-shifting being with a centuries old curse. Also starring Jet Li, The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor takes the cast to Shanghai and beyond to kick start the franchise for a third time.

While doing press for the film, Brendan Fraser enlightened journalists on his time spent in China, why Rachel Weisz didn't climb on board, and how they unearthed the famous Terra Cotta warriors.

Why do you like Stockholm so much?

BRENDAN FRASER: Everything worked! I mean, it just functioned. I'd been in many different situations and was a bit road-weary at that time - it was about ten years ago. I was pushing a movie about a guy in a loin cloth who ate bananas and plays with monkeys and smashes into trees, and the people from Stockholm thought that that was very amusing: "You'll be all right..." [laughs] And a doctor came and gave me an injection and he said, "There, now, you're inoculated for the rest of the life." And I said, 'Wait, aren't you supposed to get six of these?" And he said, "No. We only do it once here." Anyways, I won't name the doctor in case he comes after me... [laughs] Let's talk about ‘The Mummy'. Have you seen it or not? Because I haven't. Let's make sure we're all on the same page here...

Is the third time a charm?

FRASER: I think it was charming the first and the second. The first one was a fantastic experience. The second was really a remake of the first one, but what can you say? The people wanted it, the people got it. What they loved about it was that it was a big action-adventure pic with romance and enough - "Boo!" - scaring without being kind of freaky. And that's the spirit of the movie is to go on location and really live the environment of it, to take advantage of an archeologically-rich nation and find a story that everyone feels they had a handle on because we are fascinated by world history. I mean, we only need walk through the British Museum and see the halls of Egyptian mummies and... this was cool -- it was like meeting a rock star, cooler actually. I haven't met Sting yet but he'd definitely make me fall sideways. I'm a child of the '70s and '80s, give me a break... [laughs]

You didn't get to go and see The Police when they played?

FRASER: I did, I saw them in Montreal when we were shooting this. I bought the tee-shirt... what was I saying? I met an Egyptologist and the enthusiasm for the way that the man spoke about the doc-- I guess it was, about what he saw on the walls; it was almost as if he was reading the newspaper that day. I mean, it just smacked at me almost as if it was a current event. I mean, such is the interest for this subject. I guess it makes sense because the first one was a sleeper hit, and the second one was, 'We wanted more of it!', and the third one, now seven years later, for various studio political reasons I'm sure - and me sitting around rubbing my fingers going, ‘Are we gonna make a movie?’ - until finally getting a call from Steven. This would've been going on a year or a half now... I was working in the Piedmont region. Anyway, Steven wasn't going to direct it. ‘We had a good script,’ he said, ‘but we're going to look for a director.’

You broke some ribs, bruised yourself because you do all your stunts. I was wondering why would you keep torturing yourself for the third one? And did you take some precautions?

FRASER: Because I take my job too seriously! I cracked a couple of twigs, but you know, everybody else has. What are you gonna do? Just basically feel sorry for yourself a little while. It'll heal. You know what, I pay attention because I am seven years older. There is still fluid in my knees; I've had some tune-ups done. I've had the oil changed. I made sure I trained as hard as I could before I started this picture - less out of vanity and more out of survival because I didn't want to limp over the finish line on this movie like I did on the other ones. Because the truth is we'd be going to China, working on location in deserts in remote areas and the most challenging, read dangerous, part of the day was actually getting to the set. It was outside Shanghai, probably about an hour and a half, but we stayed in a local hotel in a region that I just can't pronounce the name of properly... It was a mining community and so the roads were backed up with eighteen million trucks back-to-back for miles and they only let them in several at a time into Shanghai. And getting to work was taking just pot-hilled roads and a convoy of silly sedans when we should have been in 4-wheel drive vehicles. I'm like breaking the axels off... but hey, you're really there, and the authenticity of this picture has the feel of it not being such a CGI-intensive picture that you lose sight of an environment that's created as opposed to really living it.

Certainly, coupled with the fact that to make a movie like this required so much of what I learned on the job from the first two, which was how to work as effectively as I could with CGI and to do that in a way that brought the story together and made sense for all of the legions of technicians and computer technicians later on who would have to be tracking in elements. You know, the fantasy is so supernatural that if the performances they have and the actors on screen don't match, it makes their job a lot more difficult. For instance, if something as simple as the eye line is off-- okay, there's a big scary monster here and you're looking over here, well then you can't make it work, or your eyes are crossed or something. What it comes down to is essentially letting your audience know that you believe what is really happening in the situation. As long as you do, then the CGI guys will-- and then they can make the movie and it should all be as it is meant to be, as believable a fantastical situation as it is.

Inside the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor with Brendan Fraser Page 2