“I got this horse because it’s a big horse,” he says, standing in a barn in Bedford, New York. He removes a green bandanna from his pocket and gently wipes the animal’s eyes. The horse’s name is Pecas—the Spanish word for freckles. Fraser met him on the set of a 2015 History Channel series, Texas Rising… They were filming down in Mexico, he says, when he and the horse had a shared moment of recognition. “Without doing too much—what’s the word? Anthropomorphic… anthropomorphizing… Without pretending that the animal is a human, he looked like he needed help. Like: Get me out of here, man.”

Fraser told GQ about his many injuries and how he just kept going for many years. “I felt like the horse from Animal Farm, whose job it was to work and work and work.” So when he saw Pecas being picked on by the other horses, he knew he had to take him back to his farm in New York.

“They beat up on this horse. I mean, I swear, I saw him get kicked so many times, bit, by other horses all the time. And I never saw him fight back.” Fraser watched this daily, this big, silvery horse being taunted by the sleeker horses around him. “And I thought, All right, I got a job for you if you want it.” He put the horse on a trailer, Durango to Juarez. Quarantine in El Paso. A FedEx cargo plane to New York. “And the veterinarians that ride on those cargo planes, they were like, ‘This horse walked on like he wanted to know what the movie was and what was for dinner.’ He just marched right on.”

The actor says the horse bonded with his son, Griffon, who is on the autistic spectrum.

There’s something good that happens between the two of them. And even if he doesn’t ride him, just give him a brush. The horse loves it, the repetitive motion that kids on the spectrum have that they love. And it just works… You know, you have to find those tools, strategies. If I ride, too, I just feel better. I just feel better.”