Brandon Lee’s death painfully echoes Alec Baldwin’s prop gun tragedy: inside the fatal scene that killed Bruce Lee’s son on set of The Crow
- Bruce Lee’s son was making a name for himself in Hollywood action films before he was killed by the lodged bullet tip of a prop gun while filming his breakout role
- Marvel’s Stan Lee was considering Brandon for a possible Shang-Chi film, but his untimely death forced the plan to be shelved for nearly 30 years
Alec Baldwin’s accidental fatal shooting of a cast member, widely reported to have taken place with a prop gun on the set of Rust, brings back memories of another lethal accident – one particularly close to Hongkongers' hearts.
His first major film role had come in Hong Kong when he starred in director Ronny Yu’s crime thriller Legacy of Rage (1986). There, Lee plays a naive young man set up by his friend (played by a devious Michael Wong). After time in jail, Lee gets out and seeks his revenge.
Legacy of Rage was a modest success and Lee’s work earned him a nomination at the Hong Kong Film Awards for best new performer. It was enough to make Hollywood take notice. Years later when Universal Pictures was casting for the biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, the studio was keen for Brandon to portray his father. However, the son turned down this opportunity believing it would be too awkward.
In 1991, Lee’s biggest film to date was released – the entertaining genre flick Showdown in Little Tokyo. A buddy police officer action film, Lee was partnered with Dolph Lundgren, who had already had big parts in hit films like Rocky IV and was about to make a splash in Universal Soldier opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Lee’s next film, Rapid Fire, was another modest success, debuting at No 3 on the US box office. This was enough to convince Dimension Films to cast Brandon as the eponymous hero of The Crow, a supernatural dark fantasy comic book series that was first released in 1989.
Following the huge success of Tim Burton’s gothic Batman in 1989, The Crow was to be Brandon’s big break and the chance for him to be known as something other than “the son of Bruce Lee”. The comic’s original author, James O’Barr, was initially not keen on Lee, worried that the star’s martial arts heritage would transform his work into just another chopsocky flick. However, he changed his mind upon meeting the man.
“The level of physicality and charisma he brought to the role was amazing to witness,” O’Barr said in an interview with Sean Korsgaard in 2014. “Not a lot of people realise just how hard he worked – he did all of his own fight choreography and nearly all of his own stunts, the only thing he didn’t do was falling off buildings because they wouldn’t let him. That’s without even talking about his performance – he brought the right mix of humour, pain and menace to the role.”