Dear Rutger
I owe you quite a bit; let me explain why.
As a child, back in 1982, I found this movie called Blade Runner. You have no idea how much it affected me. I always had a very vivid imagination anyway and used to spend a lot of time by myself playing with lego as my father worked very long hours on a shift pattern, so he was usually either at work or asleep when I got home from school. I created a lego Spinner, way before that was a thing. Blade Runner was the first movie that I managed to get my mother to let me see twice and I remember devouring it voraciously, drinking in every scene with wonderment. It is and will always be my most favorite movie by a huge margin.
I immediately began pretending to act out scenes with some of my friends. I was always Roy Batty or course. Deckard was cool but he wasn’t Batty cool.
I think it was the next summer, my friends and I saw Return of the Jedi and we began to put together this hybrid movie idea. I had been given a Super Eight camera and we went out onto the hills above my house and shot reel after reel of pre-teen non-sensical sci-fi imaginings. It was then that I realized I wanted to be an actor.
As I grew up, I watched movies such as Aliens, Terminator, Split Second, Salute of the Jugger, The Hitcher, the Thing and all manner of other movies both in sci-fi, horror or as a hybrid of the two. I read Stephen King’s masterpieces and became a huge fan of John Carpenter’s work too but always at the back of my mind was your wonderful closing monologue from Blade Runner, which I learned you improvised after deciding the original monologue wasn’t quite right. In the mid 80s, I bleached my hair blond (hell it was the decade for that, I have no regrets) and started out on a BBC Tv show, where I played the school bully. I would have been fifteen at the time.
As I grew up, it became apparent that my parents wanted me to ‘get a real job’ instead of following passion, which as the dutiful son, I did. In all honesty, I hated it; it wasn’t acting.
Finally it took a serious health scare and a motorcycle accident to wake me up and realize that I had been living my life for my father. Don’t get me wrong, i love him to bits and he has given me more than I could ever want but I wasn’t living my life, I was living the life he wanted me to have. I believe everyone has two lives and the second life starts when they realize what they were put on this earth to do. At an early age I knew this but it was only after the lengthy hospital stay that I truly understood it. When I came out of the hospital, I put all my energies into forging my acting career.
Now i’m much older and i’ve moved to Hollywood from the UK to pursue my acting career, i want to give thanks to everyone who has influenced me to go off and follow my dreams. One day i want to star opposite you in a movie and just say thank you in person for everything you have given me. I’m so determined and passionate that this is going to happen too. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. All I know is that I will make it happen.
I have no idea if you will ever read this but that isn’t the point. This is me just throwing my thanks to you out into the cyber-ether. You have remained a true inspiration to me and I will never forget that.
Damien Gerard 