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Brendan Fraser has earned his high-profile adventure cred: First, there’s Friday’s 3-D “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” followed by the return of his Rick O’Connell role in August’s “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperoro.”

So why has he kept such a low profile lately?

“The answer, my friends,” he said, is due to lengthy post-production special effects, particularly the 3-D kind.

“Journey” is the first film to use the real 3-D cameras developed by James Cameron for his upcoming “Avatar.”

It was shot “two summers ago,” the 39-year-old actor said. “It wasn’t that it was tabled or anything,” but theaters had to be equipped to show 3-D. The count has since topped 1,400 screens, he said.

That extra dimension was what piqued Fraser’s interest. “My eyeballs popped out of my head. The last time I saw anything in 3-D, it was an image that came from the camera I shot something through.”

Fraser also went back to the original Jules Verne novel, which inspired the original 1959 movie.

“You’ve got to have a reason to go to the center of the earth. If you are going to do an updated version, it’s not just because we can. It’s got to be some sort of human feeling. If you don’t care about the people and the story that brings them there, then in this case it would be a 3-D film where you are just going to wind up watching a fireworks display.”

Fraser is now, as Verne wrote the character, a professor whose nephew goes on the journey with him. “They have this madcap, half-baked, zany idea that there is a way to get to the center of the Earth based on mythology that there is a portal in Iceland.”