While there are some actors out there who have contracts preventing them from losing on-screen fights, there are others on the opposite side of the spectrum who seem to have a death scene in every project of which they are a part. Sean Bean’s number of big screen deaths is legendary; Steve Buscemi’s record in movies from the Coen brothers includes a gun shot, a hotel fire, a heart attack, and an axe/wood chipper; and Lance Henriksen holds a special place in pop culture being the only performer who has been killed by a Xenomorph, a Terminator, and a Predator.
It’s a weird and special Hollywood legacy – and David Dastmalchian has earned his place as part of it. While Dastmalchian has not yet been a part of the Alien, Predator, or Terminator franchises, his collection of on-screen terminations is impressive, with titles including Dune, Bird Box, Blade Runner 2049, The Suicide Squad, Boston Strangler, and The Boogeyman (and those last two just came out in 2023). That’s quite a lot of dying on camera… and it’s not a trend that is lost on the actor.
Dastmalchian’s latest feature is The Last Voyage Of The Demeter – a film about the notoriously ill-fated titular ship from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – and when I spoke to him during the movie’s virtual press day back in June, I asked about his impressive record of death scenes. Wryly, he suggested that what audiences have been witnessing in his career is a kind of macabre training. While athletes practice for a particular sport, he is practicing his own eventual demise:
My career, it seems, has become one great rehearsal for my own death. I seem to be living out dying over and over again. And I really hope that when my actual death day arrives, that it's not nearly as violent or horrid as the many ways I've had to die on screen. Denis Villeneuve has a long running joke with me that when he's got a character that is gonna die really miserably, he immediately thinks of me. And I say, 'I don't know what that says about me as a friend.'
David Dastmalchian first collaborated with director Denis Villeneuve in the making of the 2013 movie Prisoners, which features a scene where his character commits suicide in a police interrogation room. The actor isn’t featured in Villenueve’s Arrival, but he suffers a fatal blow to the neck delivered by Sylvia Hoeks’ Luv in Blade Runner 2049, and in Dune, he is poisoned to death by a toxic gas unleashed by Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto Atreides.
And we’re not just discussing big screen deaths here either. He’s also murdered in a 2014 episode of CSI, and to go along with the crushing of Polka Dot Man in The Suicide Squad, his run in the DC multiverse also includes characters who meet bitter ends on both Gotham and The Flash.
Given David Dastmalchian’s track record, you might think that he is actively seeking out movies and TV shows where his character doesn’t make it to the end credits, but you’d be wrong. As featured in the video at the top of this article, he told me that he has an enhanced fear of death, and he’s not sure that it’s great for his body that he regularly subjects it to the kind of stress that comes with performing a death scene. He continued,
It is fascinating because I'm sure I'm not unique in this at all, but the thing that has haunted me and it plagued me since childhood was a fear of my own mortality and a fear of death. And getting to confront that and trying to bring that to life in cinema is intimidating. It's scary. I don't like it because it makes your body feel really like you're actually experiencing something even though you brain knows you're not, and you're just using your imagination.
There’s a kind of trauma that comes with the work… but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still have some aspirations in the arena. I asked if there were any characters he’d like to be killed by in the future, and it would seem that he would dig the opportunity to square off with James Bond (and lose). Dastmalchian added,
Ultimately I believe that if I could face off with 007 himself or herself, depending on how they make the films in the future, it would be really cool to have to be, let's say pushed off of a giant skyscraper by 007.
The talented David Dastmalchian can currently be seen on the big screen as part of the all-star ensemble in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (spoiler alert: he doesn’t die), but audiences will get double the Dastmalchian this Friday when The Last Voyage Of The Demeter arrives in theaters everywhere.
