The Crow actor Ernie Hudson is still grieving Brandon Lee's death

'Brandon was really committed. He wanted this to really be special. This was going to be his breakout role — I think it probably would've been.'

It was later determined that the death was the result of a confluence of several different events. A couple of weeks earlier, the Smith & Wesson Model 629 revolver was used in a close-up shot that required real bullets (minus gunpowder) called “dummy rounds.” This is done because blanks don’t have an actual bullet, which is noticeable in close-up. One of those bulllets got stuck in the gun barrel and wasn’t noticed by the prop assistant who loaded the blanks (the firearms specialist had been sent home earlier by the production company). So, when the gun was fired at Lee in the scene, it dislodged the dummy round, killing him.

Lee only had a few days left of filming, so The Crow was still completed and went on to be successful, earning $94 million on its $23 million budget. It has since remained a cult classic.

Ernie Hudson played Sergeant Albrecht in The Crow and while he wasn’t on set for the death, he did know Brandon Lee and has fond memories of him. In a recent interview with Hudson, he shared with Polygon his recollections from The Crow and that he still struggles with what happened to the 28-year-old emerging star. Here is that story, in Hudson’s own words...

Ernie Hudson: I knew Brandon probably about seven or eight years before The Crow. I did a show in 1988 called Broken Badges. It was a television series with Miguel Ferrer. We shot it up in Vancouver and Brandon was flying back from China, stopping through Vancouver because he and Miguel were really good friends. He stayed over about a week and just kind of hung out. I got to know him fairly well, and when The Crow came up, Brandon requested me. I was very flattered that he had put my name in there. They also sent me Alex Proyas' reel — Alex is the director — and I was blown away. I thought, This guy's really, really talented.

Working on the show, Brandon was very welcoming. Brandon would have lunch with everybody, which is kind of rare, especially for someone starring in something so intense. He just made everybody feel like it was our film, as opposed to just his film.

On set, there were a lot of things going on. I remember, after the second or third day of filming, we were shooting at night in Wilmington. It's freezing, and Brandon was walking around with no shirt on, doing scenes in bare feet. And I'm like, “What the hell?” So I complained and the studio finally brought out heaters. I think we had an electrician on the first or second day get electrocuted. Then, the second scene I did, I pulled the muscle in my leg. It was just weird. It was kind of a hard shoot, but Brandon was really committed. He wanted this to really be special. This was going to be his breakout role — I think it probably would've been.

The night before he passed, we had dinner. I was bitching that I've been doing this a long time and “Am I ever going to get a break?” I'm just moaning and he was really encouraging. He was telling me to hang in there and, using himself as an example, that he had been doing all these films that he didn't feel that great about, but finally he got this break. He's got a three-picture deal. He was getting married. He was buying a house. “So just hang in, things get better,” using himself as an example.

The next day, I got to Minnesota for a funeral and I got a phone call saying that Brandon had died. It was kind of surreal. None of us really wanted to go back. We had about eight days left on filming, but I'm like, “No, I'm not doing it.” But I got a call from one of the stunt coordinators who reminded me how hard Brandon worked on it and this is really important. We had to do it for him, so we went back.

I will say, the studios were really pushy and demanding and, before, Alex was trying to be accommodating, but after Brandon died, it was a different Alex. He took control of the film, the set, and he really ran it. Some part of me thought, If he had just been that way before. I'm not blaming anything on him, of course, but I just wish he had exercised that confidence, because the studio — I don't know why they were so pushy. Maybe it was costly. We were running over. We're shooting at night, which is really hard.

It was a hard film, but we all felt we were working on something special. Then this accident — it's so hard to even understand how it could have happened. That’s the other part of it too — it made no sense. None of it made any sense at all.

Michael Massee, who was the actor who pulled the trigger, had a real hard time with it. I actually kind of blamed him. The police report and everything said it was an accident, but for years, I blamed Michael because I thought, as an actor, we know you don't point a gun directly at someone, even if it's a blank, and he should have been more conscious. Years later, I was in New York shooting Oz and Michael came into a restaurant and saw me. I kind of turned away because I didn't want to see him, but he saw me and came over and sat down and just, he was a mess. That incident threw his career off. He'd gone through a lot. He really felt so bad about it for the rest of his life. Later on, we actually reconnected and became friends, but Michael was never the same after that. And it wasn't his fault.

Anyway, if somebody asked me what happened, I can't explain it. I know what the police report said, but it just should never have happened. We do this stuff and it's supposed to look scary and dangerous, but we have things in place to make sure nothing like that ever happens and when it does, it's like, “How is that possible?”

I haven't seen the film in a while, but they keep doing these remakes. One of them, I think they were trying to do a TV show, and they asked me to be a part of it, and I'm like, "Brandon, he was the character." If you want to do another Crow, just make it a whole other story, don't keep trying to do Eric Draven. Why do you keep trying to remake this character? I don't get it. I know how the industry works and people want to try to capitalize and make money, but Brandon was the Crow.

Anyway, I still haven't quite — sometimes things happen, and you can kind of explain it to yourself, and you can move on, but something about The Crow just hasn't quite settled in my spirit.