“I utterly believed him.” So said director Danny Boyle of Brendan Fraser‘s role as an abusive prison guard on Showtime’s dark kaleidoscope of a drama The Affair. It’s an odd compliment to receive when you’ve just played an utter bastard, but Boyle — the Academy Award winner behind Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire — knows his way around bastards, and in the curious case of Brendan Fraser, it was entirely well deserved.

Boyle told GQ earlier this year that after watching Fraser’s work on the show hired the actor to play the oddball ex-CIA officer turned private investigator James Fletcher Chace on his new anthology series Trust, chronicling the outrageous fortunes of the Getty oil dynasty. More than just a henchman, Fraser’s Chace is a fourth-wall breaking narrator — the liaison between the audience and the stranger-than-fiction world he himself inhabits. It’s a smart choice, one that centers an actor already known and loved by millions from his roles in blockbusters like The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as goofy comedies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man, and even Oscar fare like Gods & Monsters and Crash. We all like Brendan Fraser. And it’s because he played a hateful character on The Affair that we all get the chance to like him again.

A while back I read that Brendan Fraser got his current gig starring in Danny Boyle’s Trust because of his work on The Affair, one of my favorite shows. So I dove deep into his performance, the memes that resulted from an interview he gave about it, and the comeback that began because of it for Decider.