From 'The Crying Game' to Ra in Stargate: Jaye Davidson's Striking on-Screen Legacy

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Following the Oscar nod, Hollywood talent agencies swarmed Davidson with scripts. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were in the middle of pre-production for their high-concept science-fiction epic Stargate. They wanted an actor whose visual presence could instantly project godlike, ancient authority. They fixated on Davidson to play Ra.

Davidson had zero interest in making another movie. To end the negotiations without burning professional bridges, he decided to price himself out of contention. He demanded a flat fee of $1 million, an astonishing sum in 1993 for an actor with a single independent film credit.

The studio called his bluff. They paid the million dollars.

Davidson arrived on the desert sets of Arizona and Yuma feeling trapped by his own gamble. The production was grueling. The desert heat was relentless, and the elaborate, heavy collar garments and headdresses designed for Ra were physically punishing.

Yet Davidson’s performance redefined the entire tone of the movie. As production records and retrospective interviews indicate, the character of Ra was not originally conceptualized as an extraterrestrial parasite inhabiting a human youth. The script initially envisioned an ancient human monarch. Davidson’s ethereal, otherworldly stillness, combined with his razor-edged physical poise, convinced the filmmakers to lean into something far stranger.

His low-register vocal delivery, coupled with the electronic vocal pitch-shift added in post-production, transformed Ra into one of the definitive sci-fi villains of the 1990s. He barely spoke English on screen, delivering his lines in an ancient Egyptian dialect, yet his cold stare anchored the entire $196 million box-office run.