Michael Massee, a character actor who played villains on television and film and who fired the gun on the set of “The Crow” that accidentally killed Brandon Lee in 1993, died on Oct. 20 in Los Angeles. He was 64.

The cause was stomach cancer, said his wife, Ellen.

Mr. Massee had appeared in two films, “My Father Is Coming” (1991) and “Home of the Angels” (1994), when he landed a role as a drug-addled gangster named Funboy in “The Crow.” The film starred Mr. Lee, the 28-year-old son of the martial-arts star Bruce Lee, as a rock musician who returns from the dead to wreak havoc on the gang members who murdered him and his fiancée.

On the night of March 30, 1993, Mr. Massee was filming a scene in which Mr. Lee’s character dies. Mr. Lee was supposed to walk into an apartment and encounter four gang members attacking his lover, and Mr. Massee, as one of the thugs, was supposed to shoot him at close range with a revolver loaded with blanks.

But when Mr. Massee pulled the trigger, the gunpowder in the blank cartridge ignited and fired a fragment of a bullet — probably part of a dummy shell that had been left in the gun’s barrel from an earlier scene — into Mr. Lee’s midsection. Mr. Lee collapsed and after hours of surgery, died in a hospital.