Michael Massee, the actor who unfortunately will forever be known as the man who accidentally shot and killed Brandon Lee on the set of the 1994 film The Crow, has died. He was 64.
Massee’s death was first announced by actor Anthony Delon and confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by a representative of his agent at Greene & Associates in Los Angeles. He and Delon recently worked together on the French TV series Interventions.
His wife, Ellen, told The New York Times that Massee died Oct. 20 of stomach cancer in Los Angeles.
In just his second movie appearance, Massee was playing a character known as Funboy when he fired a revolver that had been improperly prepared by crewmembers at Brandon Lee, the son of famed martial arts star Bruce Lee. The round was live and struck Lee in the stomach, and he died after several hours of surgery on March 31, 1993. He was 28.
Massee was just following the script during filming at a studio in Wilmington, N.C. Shaken by the incident, he took a sabbatical from acting that lasted more than a year. “I don’t think you ever get over something like that,” he said.
Most of The Crow, directed by Alex Proyas, had been completed before the tragedy, and the film was released in May 1994. It grossed more than $50 million in the U.S.
Massee later played Ira Gaines, an American mercenary and former Navy SEAL, on the first season of the Fox drama 24 and portrayed Charles Hoyt, the scalpel-wielding killer known as the Surgeon, on the TNT crime drama Rizzoli & Isles.
He also appeared as Gustav Fiers, aka The Gentleman, in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its 2014 sequel.
A native of Kansas City, Mo., Massee worked opposite Bill Pullman in two films released in 1997, David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Wim Wenders‘ The End of Violence, and in the 2005 NBC miniseries Revelations.
His film résumé also included the David Fincher films Seven (1995) and The Game (1997) as well as One Fine Day (1996), Amistad (1997), The Florentine (1999), Corky Romano (2001), Catwoman (2004) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
On television, Massee also could be spotted on shows including The X-Files, Murder One, Alias, Cold Case, Supernatural, Flashforward, House and The Blacklist.
