The Blade Runner Actors You May Not Know Passed Away

The film begins with a now iconic, panoramic view of 2019 Los Angeles, from the top of the monolithic Tyrell Building all the way down to the food vendors on the dark, wet streets. Above the common people, flying advertisements for the "off-world colonies" offer a fresh start on a new planet. "A golden land of opportunity and adventure!" the narrator touts, in pointed contrast to what we see on the ground.

The narrator of this airborne billboard is voice actor Marc Smith. Born in St. Louis, Smith made his name primarily as an actor in the United Kingdom. His authoritative voice made him a natural for voice work, providing English dubs for Italian roles in the 1982 BBC miniseries "Verdi" and 1985's "Mussolini and I," featuring an international cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, and Susan Sarandon. He lent his evening news-ready pipes to a number of comedies over the years as well, playing a CNN reporter in writer-director Peter Richardson's 1991 comedy "The Pope Must Die" (released in the US by Miramax under the title "The Pope Must Diet"), and lampooning Phil Donahue on Richardson's 1995 sketch comedy series "The Glam Metal Detectives." Genre fans likely know Smith best from a small role in the 1981 BBC adaptation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and for providing English dubs on a number of influential 1980s anime series, including "Project A-Ko" and "Dominion Tank Police." Smith died in 2006 at the age of 61.

One of the most notable yet unexplained design elements in "Blade Runner" is the heavy east Asian influence on its Los Angeles of the future. Perhaps keying into '80s anxieties over an economically-ascendant Japan, the mean urban streets that Deckard walks are crowded with Asian-style food stalls, open-air markets, and neon signs in multiple languages. Edward James Olmos, playing fellow blade runner Gaff, even speaks in a mishmash of English, French, and Japanese that the actor himself developed, known as "cityspeak." In Gaff's first scene, his cityspeak is translated to Deckard by a food stall operator played by actor Bob Okazaki.

Credited as "Sushi Master," the role is one of many literally no-name parts that Okazaki played over his decades-long career in Hollywood. His resume is littered with roles such as "Gardener" on episodes of "Perry Mason" and "The FBI," "Farmer" on "Love on a Rooftop" and "MASH," and simply "Oriental Man" on an episode of the Bill Bixby detective series "The Magician." While these roles may inadvertently highlight the challenges that Asian actors have long experienced in finding meaningful work as actors, they are not the entire story of Okazaki's career, which included several guest roles on the 1960s series "Hawaiian Eye" and a recurring role on the final season of the "All in the Family" spin-off "Archie Bunker's Place" in 1983. That would be Okazki's final credit; he died in 1985 at age 83.

Deckard's search for the replicant snake takes him from Cambodian Lady and Abdul Ben Hassan to a seedy Chinatown bar and burlesque club run by Taffey Lewis, a sleazy little character played by actor Hy Pyke. Lewis is less than helpful, but Deckard soon finds the snake and its owner, exotic dancer Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). Zhora quickly reveals herself as one of Roy Batty's (Rutger Hauer) fellow escaped replicants, as she nearly murders Deckard and takes off into the street.

"Blade Runner" is something of an outlier in Pyke's career, which was mostly spent in bottom-of-the-barrel B-movies such as "Spawn of the Slithis," the blaxploitation classic "Dolemite," and a soft-core erotic musical adaptation of "Don Quixote." Born Monty Pike into a family of vaudeville comedians, he found a home in the independent film scene of the 1970s, where high art, low art, comedy, and camp all mixed together — "at a time when wacky was hip," as author Foster Dickson wrote in a 2021 appreciation. Pyke died in 2006; his final film was a posthumous appearance in the 2012 indie comedy "Dealing."

Longtime character actor Morgan Paull plays Holden, the blade runner who becomes the film's first casualty as he is administering tests on new Tyrell Corporation employees to see if any of them are replicants. The test, referred to as the Voight-Kampff test, is a series of odd questions designed to provoke an emotional response. Holden gets more of a response than he bargained for while testing Leon Kowalski (Brion James), one of the escaped replicants, who sends Holden flying through the office wall via a blast from his high-powered futuristic pistol.

Born in West Virginia, Paull caught the acting bug in high school. After a few years acting on stage in Virginia and on Broadway, Paull headed to the West Coast. Roles in "Patton" and "Norma Rae" followed, along with numerous television appearances on "The FBI," "Ironside," and "Gunsmoke." Originally, he was hired by "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott simply to assist with auditions, but soon found himself given an on-camera role; "Halfway through the tests, Ridley fell in love with me," he joked to The Hollywood Reporter in 2012, shortly before his death. 

Off-camera, Paull was well known in Hollywood for his work with the Screen Actors Guild and for his conservative politics, as well as for mostly leaving acting behind starting in the 1980s to become a talent agent. He died of stomach cancer in 2012.

The tragedy of the replicants is the curse of all intelligent beings, which is the understanding that life is finite, but to yearn for more of it nonetheless. Replicants are designed to only live for four years; when Roy Batty and his collaborators escape from their off-world labor, they come to Earth not to conquer or even get revenge (though that ends up being part of it), but to find a way to keep living. Batty, played memorably by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, understands what is lost when a life ends — and in the film's climax laments that his memories will be forever gone, giving one of the all-time great cinematic death speeches:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like... tears in rain. Time to die."

While "Blade Runner" was Hauer's official introduction to American audiences, he had been a star in his native Netherlands for over a decade, collaborating with director Paul Verhoeven on bold, provocative films like "Turkish Delight" and "Soldier of Orange." In Hollywood, his shock of platinum hair and ice-blue eyes marked him early as a villain in horror films like "The Hitcher" and the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," though he was also able to flex his hero muscles in the 1985 medieval fantasy "Ladyhawke" and the action flick "Blind Fury." In 1988, Hauer won acclaim for the Italian drama "The Legend of the Holy Drinker," but remained a genre film stalwart the rest of his life, rarely appearing in the kinds of films that court awards recognition. The 21st century saw him in "Batman Begins," "Sin City," and playing TV vampires on both "Salem's Lot" and "True Blood." He died in July 2019 at age 75.