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“I wrote that. It was really fun. I just couldn’t believe when he left it in,” Olmos revealed. “Yeah. It’s a wonderful line. ‘It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?’ And ‘You’ve done a man’s job, sir.’ I think that was one of the lines that they wrote. ‘You’ve done a man’s job.’ And then I go walking away and I go, ‘Too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?’”
“I knew that [Deckard] was a replicant. See, I’m the only one that did at that moment in time,” Olmos continued. “The very last moment that Deckard’s on-screen—they changed it when they got into editing, but they went back to the original. There are four or five different cuts, but if you go to [Ridley Scott’s] final cut, at the end when Deckard’s leaving his house and Rachel goes into the elevator, he looks down and sees the origami unicorn. He realizes [Gaff] was there. Because that origami is something that I made; it was my signature. So he picks it up, looks at it, and it’s a unicorn, which was his dream. So he knows that I know his dreams at that moment. But no one ever pronounced it. And for many years, people said, ‘No, Deckard was not a replicant.’ People have argued about this so much over the years. And Ridley finally came out and he said, ‘Yeah. Deckard was a replicant.’ That’s why Blade Runner 2049 was the awakening.”
It’s safe to say that Olmos’ ad-lib definitely paid off, as the line not only delivers a wallop of emotion to viewers, but further conveys the dystopian themes of agency within the Blade Runner universe.
What do you think of Edward James Olmos ad-libbing his iconic Blade Runner line? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
