Jaye Davidson's Stargate Character Didn't Start Out As An Alien

Jaye Davidson's very short-lived career as an actor was a memorable one. He came out of nowhere to earn an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dil in Neil Jordan's controversial "The Crying Game," only losing out on the Best Supporting Actor award to Gene Hackman's malign sheriff in "Unforgiven." Although the film's portrayal of a transgender character is problematic, it was a stunning breakthrough performance that marked him as one to watch. Despite the accolades, Davidson didn't enjoy the attention that fame brought him (via Yahoo), but he hung in there to collect a cool $1 million for playing the alien antagonist in "Stargate," Roland Emmerich's sweeping sci-fi adventure. And then he was gone again, deciding stardom wasn't for him and focusing on a career in modeling and fashion design instead.

Davidson doesn't appear until over an hour into the movie, but he made an unforgettable impression at a time when Hollywood bad guys tended toward scenery-chewing pantomime villains; just take Alan Rickman hamming it up a few years earlier in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" or John Lithgow's sneering criminal mastermind in "Cliffhanger," to name just two. If anything, Davidson underplayed the role as a regal yet seductive overlord, carrying himself with the total assurance of an alien being whose absolute power has gone unchallenged for thousands of years, decked out in opulent threads and surrounded by his human shield of half-naked kids.

With his lack of acting experience, Davidson's approach seemed different from the usual screen villainy, looking suitably unearthly for a story about galactic dominion; the only shame is that we didn't get more of his captivating presence. Yet it required a significant tweak in his character to make him even more out of this world.

"Stargate" opens with two prologues: First, we're in ancient Egypt as a vast pyramid-shaped UFO descends from the sky and abducts a curious young tribesman (Dax Biagas). Next, it's 1928, and an archaeologist and his team have unearthed a remarkable find; cover stones with mysterious hieroglyphics protecting the Stargate, a large metal ring engraved with strange symbols.

In the present day, Dr. Catherine Langford (Viveca Lindfors), whose father discovered the items, invites Egyptologist and linguist Dr. Daniel Jackson (James Spader) to take a look at the artifacts, which are now part of a top-secret project. Keeping a close eye on their progress is Special Operations Colonel Jack O'Neill (Kurt Russell).

Jackson deciphers the symbols with frankly ridiculous ease and they fire up the Stargate, opening a wormhole to a distant planet. He then joins O'Neill and his team of commandos to investigate whatever is on the other side, emerging in a desert temple beneath a pyramid. The snag is that the symbols needed to re-open the gate are missing, prompting O'Neill to ready his secondary objective: destroy the Stargate with a nuke if things don't go well.

The team discovers a tribe of slaves who speak a dialect of Ancient Egyptian and seem like a friendly bunch. Jackson is able to communicate and figure out their back story. Thousands of years ago, an alien posing as the Sun God Ra (Jaye Davidson) kidnapped a bunch of humans from Earth and set them to work on this planet, harvesting materials to give him everlasting life.

When Ra's guards capture the team and discover the bomb, he plans to send it back to Earth to destroy the civilization he created there. Meanwhile, the slaves are preparing to rebel against their overlords and help save the day.

"Stargate" is a strangely underwhelming sci-fi spectacle. Its scope is epic and the rousing score by David Arnold gives a sense of good old-fashioned adventure, but it feels rather small. Despite its cast of hundreds, it seems a little underpopulated; for all the special effects and action set pieces, large swathes of it are lacking in drama or thrills. Given the success of the TV series that followed, it feels like the world's most expensive pilot episode.

Luckily, we have a memorable-if-underused bad guy in Jaye Davidson's Ra, who wasn't originally intended to be an alien. Producer and co-writer Dean Devlin revealed (via Variety):

"He wasn't originally an alien in the movie. He was originally an Egyptian who worked for the aliens. He was the boss of the humans, but he was still slave to the aliens. One day I'll never forget, Roland [Emmerich] and I were in the car together and we went, 'Wait a minute! He doesn't work for the aliens. He is an alien!'"

That change was a vital one. If he was just a human henchman for the aliens he might not have seemed so authoritative and imposing. There would also be a risk that we might feel some sympathy for him.

Turning him into an evil intergalactic Pharoah made sure there was no chance of that, and giving him glowing eyes and a voice like Gozer from "Ghostbusters" hints at the horrible alien lurking beneath his beautiful visage. He's a villain we want to see blown up at the end. So much of that is down to Davidson's charismatic performance, the man who made an astonishing cameo in cinema history, took the money and left to carry on with his life.