

Young with costar Rutger Hauer, who played the replicant Roy Batty



Blade Runner was released in the late June of 1982, where it had great difficulty stealing attention from the behemoth E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, which occupied the #1 slot from its premiere on June 11 until early September (!), when the great cinematic classic known as Zapped! finally dislodged it from the top slot.

I was 12 years old when Blade Runner came out. All of my friends and I understood to the bone that Han Solo (for that was Harrison Ford’s primary identity back then) appearing in a dark and fucked-up cyborg cop adventure was about the coolest thing that had ever happened.

Blade Runner was just Sean Young’s third movie (she had been in Stripes already), and it remains the movie she’s probably best known for. Young is still very active in Hollywood, according to IMDb, which also states that she appeared in a recent noteworthy movie, 2015’s striking horror western Bone Tomahawk (I hadn’t noticed—her role is very small).

Young may have been aware of what a coup appearing in Blade Runner was, in that she seems to have spent much of her time snapping photos with her handy Polaroid camera. She appears to have had zero interest in documenting the astonishing practical effects used in the movie—rather, all of the pics are of herself and her coworkers. She uploaded these pics to her website in 2011, but the site is defunct today—you can see the full set of her Polaroids here.









Young with costar Harrison Ford, who plays the protagonist Deckard





Young with the movie’s director, Ridley Scott



































Mark Kermode hosts “On the Edge of Blade Runner,” a Channel 4 documentary about the movie that first aired in 2000:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

‘Hot Lust in Space’: Fictional magazine covers from the newsstand scene in ‘Blade Runner’

