From Brendan Fraser to Jennifer Coolidge, there’s more to these feel-good unretirement stories than meets the eye. 

We’re only a few weeks into the year, but let’s face facts: 2023 belongs body and soul to Hollywood’s so-called comeback kids.

It’s a term that’s been hurled around a lot over the past month, perhaps understandably. After all, Brendan Fraser has been nominated for an Oscar for The Whale, his first lead role in a major film for 12 years, and Ke Huy Quan – who starred as a child in two of the most beloved films of the 1980s – is also suddenly a best actor nominee thanks to his standout performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Coolidge and Michelle Yeoh just won their first Golden Globes for The White Lotus and Everything Everywhere All At Once respectively. And Lindsay Lohan (yes, we went there) has expanded her partnership with Netflix, signing a deal to star in two new films for the streaming service following the world’s warm reception to Falling For Christmas.

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It’s easy, of course, to laud these unretirement narratives as simple comebacks – or as a bit of feel-good sizzle to remind everyone that it’s never too late to make good on your dreams. But there’s more to it all than just that.

Indeed, as Lily Allen pointed out via Twitter about this year’s Globe winners: “From Ke Huy Quan to Jennifer Coolidge and Michelle Yeoh, they all mentioned how miserable they’d felt over the years and how hope had started to fade.

“Nice they’re all getting their flowers.”

Allen’s not wrong, because none of this year’s big comeback stories are about people happily retiring into obscurity and then rocking back onto the Hollywood circuit for a late-life hurrah. Rather, they’re about people who were never given the space and room to succeed in the first place.

In the late 1990s, Fraser was the ridiculously buff heartthrob star of George Of The Jungle and The Mummy, but was left “in the wilderness” for a decade after he publicly accused Philip Berk, a former president and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – the organisation behind the Golden Globes – of groping and assaulting him in 2003. (Berk has denied the allegation describing Fraser’s description of events as a “total fabrication”). 

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Quan, after finding fame in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and The Goonies, was forced to abandon his hopes of acting when he struggled to find work in an industry where opportunities for Asian-American actors were few and far between. Indeed, in 1993 he found himself “competing against a roomful of Asian actors for a no-name two-line part” and was left heartbroken when his agent informed him he’d been unsuccessful.

“I remember sitting at the edge of my bed for an hour. I didn’t move. I was just thinking, Wow, what am I doing?” he says in a new Vanity Fair profile, explaining that this was what drove him to quit acting altogether. “I decided that this was not the way to live.”

Coolidge, of course, was an icon in the 90s and 00s thanks to her roles as Stifler’s mom in the American Pie series and Paulette in Legally Blonde, but the comedy icon (now 61) has said that the roles became fewer and further in between as she grew older.

“I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened is they get sort of fizzled by life,” she stated in her exhilarating Globes acceptance speech. 

“I thought I was going to be queen of Monaco even though someone else did it. And then you get older and think, ‘Oh, what the fuck is going to happen?”

Yeoh, too, feels as if she’s been a near-constant presence on our screens, but she, too, made a point of acknowledging that she wasn’t expecting to win her first big award at this point in her decades-long career. “I turned 60 last year,” she said, “and I think all of you women understand this as the days, years, numbers get bigger, the opportunities get smaller as well.

“I probably was at a time where I thought, ‘Come on, girl. You had a really really good run. You worked with some of the best people… it’s all good.’”

And Lohan – who positively dominated our screens in the 00s with her work on The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday, Mean Girls and more – all but disappeared when the tabloids became obsessed with her personal life, subjecting the actor to years of intense and prolonged media and public scrutiny.

“When I first started out in the business, none of us had a say in how to control our own narrative,” she explained recently. 

“There were paparazzi pictures, and then people ran with it.”

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None of these actors wanted to disappear, essentially – but all were made to feel as if they had no place in Hollywood. All were made to feel smaller than they are. And all were made to feel as if they’d had their time in the spotlight – that they were no longer welcome.

Now, at long last, it seems as if things are changing. Older, established women are seeing the fruits of their labour, for starters – and Hollywood movies are more ethnically diverse than ever according to a new report from UCLA, which found that women and people of colour “have made enormous gains” over the past decade in their share of leading roles in top-performing films. And the #MeToo movement has empowered survivors like Fraser to not only speak up and speak out against their abusers, but to step back into the spotlight, too.

Of course, some credit is owed to an unlikely hero: social media. Because, as Lohan herself has said, it offers stars like herself the chance to take back control of their own narratives. “It’s really good that in this day and age, people can say who they are and who they want to be,” she says. “And I admire and appreciate that.”

And, finally, let’s not dismiss the power of the comeback kid narrative entirely. Because, let’s face it, it takes great human strength, dedication and resilience to keep going, in spite of everything life throws at you – and watching someone embody all of these traits feels incredibly inspiring. To quote the late Helen Keller, “The world is full of suffering, but it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

Perhaps, though, the term ‘comeback kid’ does all of these hardworking actors a disservice. Perhaps, instead, we’d be better referring to them as the Hollywood underdogs, who faced insurmountable odds but still held tight to their dreams. Who have, yes, received their flowers, but only after planting and carefully tending to them for years.

Because remember, it’s not just where you wind up: it’s how far you’ve climbed to get there, too.

Images: Getty

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