What happened to Brandon Lee on the set of ‘The Crow’?
Being the child of an icon places immense pressure on any second-generation actor who chooses to follow in the family business, but Brandon Lee was well on the way to securing stardom of his own before tragedy struck on the set of The Crow.
The son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, the actor had been gaining plenty of notice in his own right after displaying plenty of screen presence, charisma, and hand-to-hand combat prowess as he built up his own filmography with Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire showcasing that he had all the potential in the world to step out of his father’s shadow and stand on his own two feet.
Taking top billing in a comic book adaptation was the biggest role of his career to date, and it would also prove to be his last. With only three more days of filming left to complete, Lee was shooting a scene from early on in the story where Eric Draven is gunned down by the assailants who murder his fiancé in what proved to be a harrowing moment of life imitating art.
What should have been a routine action sequence turned out to be fatal after the leading man was shot and killed by a prop firearm. After being rushed to hospital and spending six hours in emergency surgery, Lee was declared dead on March 31st, 1993, at the age of just 28 years old.
How did Brandon Lee die?
Instead of using standard dummy cartridges of a similar ilk to those found on the set of countless major productions, budgetary and scheduling restraints forced the props department of The Crow to craft their own by removing the bullets, powder charge, and primer from live rounds before reinserting them back into a gun so they’d effectively be blanks.
Blank rounds were intended to be used for the scene in question, which contain both powder charge and primer, but are deemed safe enough to use during filming because the lack of a bullet means it can be fired without the potential of a projectile emerging from the barrel.
However, with the firearms specialist not present, a prop assistant was tasked to safety check the firearms before cameras were rolling. The Smith & Wesson revolver was loaded with a blank round, but nobody noticed the dummy bullet casing that was still in the barrel. When it was fired on set, the dummy fired at almost the same rate it would have done were it a live round, where it struck Lee in the abdomen and caused him fatal injury.
Who shot Brandon Lee?
Michael Massee – who played Funboy in The Crow – was the person who pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Lee, leaving him so traumatised that he took a year away from acting, never saw the finished film, and very rarely spoke about the incident in public prior to his death in October 2016.
“I don’t think you ever get over something like that,” he said in a rare interview on the subject with Extra in 2005. “It absolutely wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t even supposed to be handling the gun until we started shooting the scene, and the director changed it.”
Massee admitted that more than a decade later, he still had nightmares over the incident, and while no blame was laid at his door and Lee’s death was ruled to be an accident, it had a profound and life-altering impact on the person who unwittingly instigated the incident.
