Brendan Fraser, a Kid at Heart

Brendan Fraser has a theory on why he does so well with kids.

"Cause I've got permanent Great Dane puppy-syndrome," he says, pulling his feet under him in the lounge of a fancy Washington hotel, while erupting into a loud giggle and pawing at the arm of a couch. "You know -- when you don't know how big you are."

And certainly that seems to help, as do the giant gumball-size eyes and rubber-band jaw muscles.

But we have another theory: reverence for his young audience.

"Look at the questions that were asked tonight," Fraser continues, after a Q&;A session that followed a screening of his new adventure flick, "Journey to the Center of the Earth." "The most precise details came from the mouths of babes. . . . You can't kid a kid."

"How do you do 3-D?" was the first question, asked by a boy of 7 or 8. Today Fraser frenetically riffs on the topic like an astronomy-junkie who just discovered a new galaxy.

But it wasn't a question the actor could've answered 2 1/2 years ago when he was first sent a pitch for the film (based on the classic 1864 Jules Verne novel) that mentioned, in its last sentence, plans to shoot in three dimensions.

"Three-D had gotten a bad name. That's why I was a little bit reticent at first, thinking it might be a bit hokey. The old red eye, blue eye thing, which as I recall was not that satisfying: The glasses were made out of paper, and it kind of made me feel a little queasy," he recalls in trademark speed-talking patter. "But it still stood apart from anything else that had come across my radar."

Fraser met with director Eric Brevig, who showed him how far the technology had come and explained that this film, if done correctly, could lead a wave of new 3-D features being ushered in by the advances in digital projection.

Upon seeing the demo, Fraser was wowed and ready but felt that the script, which had been through multiple re-writes, wasn't. Moreover, he wanted a producing credit and license to oversee the screenplay edits.

"I didn't want to say: 'It's broken. I know how to fix it.' But I was kind of like, 'Come on, give me the ball, coach. I know how to do this,' " he remembers.

Fraser knew early on that he wanted to act. He graduated from a Seattle performing arts college in 1990 and two years later landed the lead in "Encino Man." It has been a prolific, if disjointed, 16 years since. Consider: "George of the Jungle" and "Gods and Monsters," "The Mummy Returns" and "Crash."