Movieline, Dec./Jan., 2000
By Wolf Schneider

Oded Fehr had about a dozen lines and as many minutes of screen time in The Mummy, but boy, did he make an impact. As the darkly exotic desert ruler who becomes Brendan Fraser's ally, he took up where Omar Sharif left off in the heartthrob department a generation ago in Lawrence of Arabia. Which is fitting. "When I was in drama school," says Fehr, who was raised in Israel and trained in England, "for three years I was told 'You're the next Omar Sharif, the next Omar Sharif, the next Omar Sharif.'

The thing is, Omar Sharif didn't have to finesse a line like "Save the girl, kill the creature!" which is just one of the choice utterances Fehr had to bring off in The Mummy. And he did it so well that when director Stephen Sommers took one look at the dailies, he decided to alter the ending so Fehr's character, Ardeth Bay, could live. "My agent had been like, "It's wonderful that we're getting this job, but too bad you die at the end,'" says Fehr. "And I would say, 'Yeah, but I'm the last one to die.' Then in Morocco one morning, Stephen said, 'Listen, I see no reason why Ardeth should die. He's a nice guy, and anyway, when we make the sequel . . ."

While The Mummy was becoming a monstrous hit ($380 million worldwide), Fehr was already playing a French-Canadian crook in the upcoming James Van Der Beek actioner Texas Rangers, and was about to play a European gigolo in the Adam Sandler-produced romantic comedy Deuce ("How many guys do you know that would turn down a part where the script says, 'And he enters into this hot tub with all these naked women?'"). What's Fehr's strategy now that The Mummy has upped his Hollywood ante? "I'll try to pick up the jobs that Antonio Banderas turns down," he shoots back, laughing.