Hauer became a hall-of-famer with his ‘Tears in Rain’ speech in Blade Runner, but there was much more to this talented, stylish actor
“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” So begins the icily elegant final speech in Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner. It is famously delivered by the Dutch star Rutger Hauer, playing Roy, the charismatic replicant rebel with the mysterious moral sense who rescues Harrison Ford’s cop Deckard from falling at the very last. And as the rain streams down his face, Roy pronounces: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
C-beams evidently means the “caesium beams” used in space combat and the Tannhäuser Gate apparently an interstellar portal. The speech was semi-improvised, the “tears in rain” line being Hauer’s own idea. Did he, at some unconscious level, access a memory of the Everly Brothers’ Crying in the Rain? Either way, he gave this devastatingly bleak and opaque aria a touch of what later generations might call relatability; he sold it to movie audiences around the world who might otherwise at that late stage be too punch-drunk with postmodern sci-fi action to pay attention to a tricky closing speech. It conferred on Hauer himself real hall-of-famer status. His enigmatic combination of despair, forgiveness, and passionate connoisseurship of what it is to be alive – which as a replicant, he can hardly know as much as real humans – supplies a satisfying ending to the film, an ending that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
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