Brandon Lee chose a passage from Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, about how few times we will truly watch a full moon rise, for his wedding invitations; it is now etched on his tombstone. This episode looks past the two events that dominate his public story, being the son of Bruce Lee and the accident on the set of The Crow, to illuminate the driven artist in between. Born in Oakland in 1965 and trained by his father, he lost him at age eight and grew up under looming gym photographs of a legend.

The conversation follows his rebellion into soccer, expulsion from the Chadwick School months before graduation, theater study at Emerson College, and the strategic decision to pay Hollywood’s toll with action roles in Kung Fu: The Movie, Legacy of Rage, Laser Mission, Showdown in Little Tokyo, and Rapid Fire. It then details his total physical transformation into Eric Draven for The Crow and the cascading chain of negligence with dummy rounds, a squib load, and a blank that killed him on March 31, 1993, at age 28.

• Why he turned down playing his own father in Dragon, and the advice he gave Jason Scott Lee instead
• His refusal to claim Jeet Kune Do, and his view of martial arts as a tool for internal self-discovery
• Weighing every ounce of food and designing an aerobics-inflected fighting style so audiences would see only Eric Draven
• The ice baths he took to feel what waking from the dead might be like
• How the film was completed with stunt doubles and early CGI and became a cult classic in 1994