Movie directors love to kill me.
This truth didn’t dawn on me until a newspaper reporter pointed it out by asking me why it is, with alarming regularity, that I am the guy that gets beat, pulverized, and generally killed in so many of the movies I work on.
Ways Actor Paul Cram’s Characters Have Met Their Maker
- Blown up by bomb/landmine
- Death by poison
- Mauled by a bear/wild animal
- Death by drug overdose
- Bullet to the brain, face, stomach and/or back
- Stabbed in the neck, back and/or stomach
- Run over by a car
- Bled to death from an open wound while crawling on concrete
- Bled to death while crawling across a frozen lake
- Broken neck
- …the list goes on & on
I hadn’t thought about it much. All these dire ends to my characters. But the question posed by the newspaper reporter forced me to think about it.
I almost didn’t jot that list above. I grabbed a pad of paper and was just about to write out a bullet point list of the ways I’d died… but I paused though just before putting ball point pen to paper. I felt weird.
Would writing down the ways I’d died in movies somehow like be writing out a personal jinx and I’d never get cast ever again in these fun kinds of roles? (Trust me, It didn’t sound so over dramatic in my head at the time.)
But I thought then that some of the great writers of mystery novels, like Agatha Christie, maybe kept a little note pad on their night stand where she’d jot down lists like “ways to kill characters” and “poisons that leave no trace”. That got me over the weird superstitious-ness. If Agatha Christie could delve into a sort of dark-side while writing, I’ll be good too.
I don’t know exactly why I get cast in so many of these macabre roles.
Some of the reason is certainly because of the horror movie genre. Though that’s not the only genre movie that I get beat up in because I’ve done some comedy and drama. With the same effects on my characters.
I have the suspicion a percentage of the reason is because of my body type.
Heretofore, for centuries of human society, it’s been the skinny guys that get picked on. A sort of “survival of the fittest” coming into play.
It’s a creative writer that comes up with a new way to kill my character.