Pris was a Nexus-6 replicant in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, played by Daryl Hannah. Built as a basic pleasure model for military clubs in the Off-world colonies, she came to Earth with the escaped group led by Roy Batty. In Los Angeles she won the trust of the lonely genetic designer J.F. Sebastian, who gave Roy his way into the Tyrell Corporation. In November 2019 she waited for Rick Deckard in the Bradbury Building, hidden among Sebastian's toys, and died in the fight that followed.
Biography
Inception
Pris was a Nexus 6 female replicant built by the Tyrell Corporation, serial N6FAB21416, with an incept date of 14 February 2016. Her police file rated her physical level A and her mental level B, and listed her function as military and leisure. Captain Harry Bryant called her a basic pleasure model, the standard item for military clubs in the outer colonies. Like every Nexus-6, she carried a built-in four-year lifespan, a fail-safe the designers added to these replicant models in case they developed emotions of their own.
She escaped Off-world with Roy Batty, Leon Kowalski, Zhora and others, slaughtering twenty-three people and seizing a shuttle to reach Earth. Some of the group died when they tried to break into the Tyrell Corporation and were fried by its electrical field. The survivors split up across Los Angeles to look for a way to extend their lives, and the eye maker Hannibal Chew told Roy and Leon that the genetic designer J.F. Sebastian could take them to Eldon Tyrell. Pris was the one sent to win Sebastian's trust, and by November 2019, about three years and nine months after her incept date, her own four years were close to running out.
Meeting Sebastian
Pris waited for her chance in a pile of rubbish outside the Bradbury Building, where Tyrell's genetic designer J.F. Sebastian lived alone. When he came home one rainy night she was asleep in the trash, and his arrival startled her into running off. She crashed into the window of his van, then stopped and let him catch up with her. She told him she was lost, hungry and had nowhere to go, and he invited her inside to get out of the rain.
The act was simple, and it worked on a man who had few visitors and no friends but the ones he built. Pris played a homeless runaway, looking soaked and vulnerable rather than dangerous. Sebastian was glad of the company and asked her no hard questions. He gave her a place to stay in the empty building, which was exactly what Roy needed.
The Bradbury Apartment
Inside, Sebastian's apartment was full of the toys and automatons he had made, including Bear and Kaiser, who greeted his guest at the door. Pris asked whether he lived in the huge building alone and learned that there was no housing shortage in a city most people had left for the colonies. She studied his face and asked his age, and Sebastian told her he was twenty-five but suffered from Methuselah syndrome, which made his glands age him too fast. His illness kept him from passing the medical exam for Off-world emigration, which was why he had stayed behind on Earth.
The next day Pris made herself up in front of his mirror, airbrushing a pale face with a black band across her eyes. She was playful with Sebastian and treated his creations like playmates. She also kept watching him closely, and saw that his rapid aging was a version of her own short life. The apartment gave her a safe base, but she was already waiting for Roy.
Roy Batty's Arrival
When Roy Batty arrived, Pris ran to him and they kissed, and she introduced Sebastian as her savior, the friend who had taken her in. Roy told her that Leon and Zhora were both dead, leaving only the two of them. The news hit her hard, and she knew their own deaths were coming soon. The two of them then turned all their charm on their host.
Over a strange breakfast they told Sebastian they were Nexus-6 replicants, and Pris showed off by plucking an egg straight from boiling water. When Sebastian worried about how little time they had, Pris compared their condition to his own accelerated decrepitude. Roy explained that they needed Tyrell's help and that Pris had very little time left, and Sebastian, who could play chess with Tyrell, agreed to take Roy to him. Pris stayed behind in the apartment while the two men left for the Tyrell pyramid.
The Doll Disguise
After Roy killed Tyrell and Sebastian, Rick Deckard called the Bradbury apartment on the vidphone. Pris answered and hung up without a word, which told him where the last replicants were hiding. She prepared for him by covering her face in white makeup with its black band and sitting motionless under a veil among Sebastian's dolls. When Deckard moved through the dark apartment with his gun drawn, she looked like just one more of the toys.
Death In The Bradbury
Pris struck as soon as Deckard came close, kicking him across the room and beating him with far greater strength than any human. She caught his head between her thighs in a scissor hold and tried to crush the life out of him. He got free and recovered his gun, and Pris came at him again with a run of cartwheels and backflips across the floor. Deckard shot her in mid-attack, and she fell screaming and thrashing until he fired again and she lay still.
Roy came back to find Pris dead on the floor and kissed her body. Her death drove him into a cold rage, and he hunted Deckard through the rotting building. When he caught the blade runner he broke two of his fingers, one for Zhora and one for Pris. She was the last of the group to die before Roy himself.
Personality
Pris combined a childlike manner with a cold, practical mind, and could switch between the two in an instant. She played the lost waif for Sebastian and the playful guest among his toys, yet she always knew why she was there. Her loyalty belonged entirely to Roy, who had brought her out of the colonies, and she trusted him to save them both. She was quick to fear and quick to grief, as when she heard that Zhora and Leon were dead.
She was also proud of what she was, and liked showing Sebastian what a Nexus-6 could do. When he asked the pair to show him something, she answered with Descartes, claiming thought as proof of her own existence. Plucking an egg from boiling water with her bare hand was part game and part warning, a reminder that the fragile waif he had taken in was stronger than any human. In the end she met Deckard with the same ferocity she had hidden behind her charm, and she fought to the last rather than run or surrender.
Other Appearances
Marvel Blade Runner Comic
Pris appears in Marvel Super Special #22, which follows the film closely. In the comic it is Pris herself who spots the link between Sebastian's rapid aging and their own four-year lifespans. She and Roy embrace Sebastian once he agrees to help them reach Tyrell. Her fight with Deckard is cut down to a few panels, in which she traps him between her legs before he breaks free and shoots her.
In The KW Jeter Books
Pris appears in K. W. Jeter's Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human, mostly through what others reveal about her. When Sarah Tyrell replays Bryant's briefing tape for Deckard, she counts Pris among the escaped group and finds only five of the six replicants Bryant had named, which sets Deckard after a missing sixth. At the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, J. R. Isidore tells him he has seen the postmortem bone marrow results, and that Pris had been human. Deckard had killed her because she matched the ID picture he was shown, without ever giving her an empathy test.
Isidore explains that her name really was Pris and that she was probably born in one of the U.N. colonies on Mars, where mental breakdowns were common. She belonged to a group he calls wannabes, humans who fall in with replicants and then suffer a psychotic break in which they come to believe they are replicants themselves. Their bodies follow their minds, taking on replicant strength and resistance to harm, until they escape to Earth and are hunted down like the real thing. Deckard later reminds himself that there had never been any Pris-model replicants, only the one in her own mind.
Sebastian had taken her body from the police morgue and rebuilt it as a motorized Pris-thing, a blind, white-haired husk with red ember eyes and a hair-trigger temper. It lived with him and his toys Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar in a tilted safe-house apartment in the sideways zone. To keep himself alive to care for her, he whittled away at his own body the same way he had on her, leaving himself with one arm. When Deckard arrived, the creature burst out of the bedroom and throttled him until Sebastian pulled it away.
The Pris-thing later glared at Deckard from the back rooms and hissed at Dave Holden, while Sebastian admitted he could not be sure what she remembered. When it rose up before Sarah Tyrell as if it recognized her, she shot it in the face, leaving Sebastian screaming in the doorway. Unable to bring himself to switch off her ruined body, Sebastian lost track of it as it crept away into the rubble. Holden later watched it crawl to the corpse of the Roy Batty templant and lay its cheek against his, and Deckard stopped him from shooting it.
In Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night, Deckard remembers her as the psychotic would-be replicant Pris who beat him in the Bradbury Building. Sebastian, now ruling a private world of his own making, rebuilds the Bradbury and its toys perfectly but cannot bring her back, and comes to suspect he never truly knew what she was. Deckard tells him she may simply have fled somewhere else, giving him a reason to keep his world in existence. The templant of Roy Batty also claims that Pris, Zhora and Kowalski all knew exactly what they were, and she does not appear in Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon.
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Pris appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as Pris Stratton, a Nexus-6 android of the same subtype as Rachael Rosen, so the two share the same face. On Mars she first lived on the painkiller silenizine supplied by Roy Baty, then on the smuggled pre-colonial space fiction that stamp dealer Horst Hartman introduced her to. She found the colony unbearably lonely and old, and fled to Earth with seven other androids, among them Max Polokov, Garland and Luba Luft. Bounty hunters began retiring the group one by one soon after they arrived.
Pris hid in a decaying, nearly empty building in the suburbs, where the only other tenant was J. R. Isidore, a special whom others dismissed as a chickenhead. When he knocked to welcome her, she gave her name as Rachael Rosen before correcting it to Stratton, her married name, and plainly asked whether he was a chickenhead. Isidore later returned with rare black-market food and wine, and her delight turned at once to bitterness as she asked him to leave. She then admitted that she had come with seven friends from Mars and might be the last of them still alive.
Roy and Irmgard Baty soon arrived with news that Polokov, Garland, Luba Luft, Anders and Gitchel were dead, and Roy had Pris move in with Isidore. She tried to pass the group off as schizophrenics who had fled a mental hospital on the East Coast, but Isidore soon realized they were androids and offered to help them anyway. At her call they voted on whether to stay, and while Roy wanted to kill Isidore and hide elsewhere, Pris and Irmgard chose to make their stand in the building. Pris argued that his value to them outweighed the danger of what he knew.
Her coldness showed when Isidore brought home a live spider, one of the rarest creatures left on Earth. While Buster Friendly exposed Mercerism as a fraud on television, she cut off its legs one by one with a pair of scissors to see whether it could still walk. Roy held a match to the crippled spider to force it to move, and Isidore was left horrified by the androids' indifference. Meanwhile Rachael warned Deckard that Pris shared her face, admitted she identified with her, and even offered to retire Stratton herself.
When Rick Deckard entered the building, Mercer appeared and warned him that the hardest of the three was behind him on the stairs. Pris glided up toward him with her arms reaching out and a laser tube in her hand, and for a moment he took her for Rachael. He fired as she rushed him, and her laser tube rolled back down the stairs as she died. Inside the apartment he told Irmgard there was no Pris, only Rachael Rosen over and over, and afterward Isidore came to him weeping because he had seen her body on the stairs.
BOOM! Studios Comic
Pris appears in the BOOM! Studios comic adaptation, which sets Dick's full text beside the art and follows the novel closely. The art shows her alone in a bare apartment piled with kipple, the junk that builds up in unused rooms, in an otherwise empty building where John Isidore is the only other tenant. When Isidore returns with black-market food and offers his friendship, her delight turns at once to bitterness, and she coldly asks him to leave. She then admits that she once had seven friends from Mars and may be the last of them still alive.
Once Roy and Irmgard Baty arrive, Pris shelters with them in Isidore's apartment. While the androids wait there, she snips the legs off a spider one at a time to see whether it can still walk, as Isidore watches in horror. The comic draws her with the same face as Rachael Rosen, since both belong to the same Nexus-6 type. When she comes at Deckard on the stairs he hesitates at the resemblance, then shakes it off and retires her.
Behind The Scenes
Daryl Hannah, born in Chicago in 1960, had small roles in The Fury and The Final Terror before landing her first major part in Blade Runner. Five actresses screen-tested for Pris, each creating her own version of the makeup and wardrobe, including Monique van de Ven and Stacey Nelkin, who was cast instead as the cut replicant Mary. Hannah saw Pris as naive as a young child yet sly, a replicant working against a deadline. Rutger Hauer played the bond between Pris and Roy as close to that of siblings, with Roy as the one who had saved her from the life she was built for.
The black band of Kabuki-style makeup was Ridley Scott's idea, partly inspired by Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu. Makeup artist Marvin Westmore guided Hannah's hand on the airbrush, and her habit of rolling her eyes back came from her screen test. For the doll scene she wore a flesh-colored unitard with a molded breastplate and kept her breathing shallow to stay still under the veil. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler shot the close-up of Pris answering Deckard's vidphone call.
The script only hinted at Pris's acrobatics, and the cartwheels and flips were added at Hannah's suggestion, drawing on her own gymnastics experience, but most were performed by male gymnast Mike Washlake in a wig and leotard after the female double tired. Washlake struck a wall upside down during one take, while Hannah herself performed the death throes, filmed at a slightly slower camera speed. Westmore also created the bloody stomach wound seen in her final moments. A planned fight in a gymnasium was never shot.
Her death differs between the versions of the film. In the Workprint, the US theatrical cut and the Director's Cut, Deckard fires two shots, while the International Cut and the Final Cut show three and keep extra brutal moments from the struggle. Decades later, Denis Villeneuve cast Mackenzie Davis as Mariette in Blade Runner 2049 partly because she could pass as a younger sister to Hannah's Pris.
Conclusion
Pris was the quiet center of Roy Batty's plan, the replicant who found Sebastian and opened the road to Tyrell. Her mix of childlike play and deadly violence made her one of Blade Runner's most memorable figures. Her ambush among the dolls is one of the film's most famous scenes, and her death gave Roy's last night its fury. In the novel she is a colder figure who shares Rachael's face, while Jeter's books turn her into a human who only believed she was a replicant.
Appearances
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Marvel Super Special #22: Blade Runner (Marvel Comics, 1982)
- Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995)
- Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (mentioned)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (novel, 1968)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (BOOM! Studios comic)
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Characters | Replicant Characters
