As a legend of dark cinema, Udo Kier spent a lot of his film career around cemeteries. It’s therefore fitting that his final role was as Roger, a cancer-riddled plastic surgeon looking to end his suffering but literally afraid to pull the trigger, who finds himself considering his mortality at the bottom of his own unfinished grave. Yet that’s exactly the concept of short film “My Beautiful Grave,” the iconic actor’s swansong performance which screens as part of the Austin Film Festival.
“I’m really into the idea of gravestones,” writer/director Sam Fayed said. “[Producer Orian Williams] and I joke that we’re both Scorpios and so we’re really into the underworld, and of course I’d make a film about a guy in a dark hole.”
Austin-based Fayed explained that he and his writing partner, Paul Graf, usually concentrate on character studies, but for this short “we wanted to write a reflective film about existence and mortality. We began spitballing ideas [and] we came up with this older gentleman who is terrified of killing himself.”
Certain elements of the character quickly came into focus – that he was a German expat, that he was obsessed with beauty. At the same time he needed an antagonist of sorts, and this came in the form of Rohan (Greek actor Yiannis Niarros), who Fayed described as “our view on celebrity and modern youth and being a pop star.”
With the characters outlined, Fayed explained that he and Graf start working on “the intentions, yearnings, all that stuff, and then we’ll riff on dialogue a lot. We wrote a bunch of monologues and then the story just came out of that.”
Next came the casting, and if you put the pieces together – a well-traveled German aesthete with a morbid side – then the only possible actor for the part would be the legendary Udo Kier. But how could an unknown filmmaker hope to attract the beloved star of seminal works like Flesh for Frankenstein, Blood for Dracula, My Own Private Idaho, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, who had worked with every auteur from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Werner Herzog to Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier, Wim Wenders, and even Rob Zombie?
Luckily, Williams knew him from working as a production coordinator on vampire comic flick Blade. Williams recalled, “Udo said, ‘Orian, I don’t want anyone to drive me but you. This PA guy is terrible,’ and so I became his driver.” In those rides to set, Williams started talking to him about his own vampire film that he was developing, “and Udo said, ‘Well, you know that I am the ultimate Dracula, I have to be in that film.’”
That film was Shadow of the Vampire, in which the actor played Nosferatu set designer and noted occultist Albin Grau, and on which Williams began his career as a producer. So that’s how Kier’s name ended up on the list of 15 potential actors that Williams sent to Fayed. Williams said, “I didn’t have any particular inspiration. I just thought, I like Udo. He’s really cool, and it kind of looked like maybe it would work, but I’m going to let Sam make the decision.”
And Fayed did, quickly. The director, “I looked at the list and told him, ‘I’ll make it real easy for you. Udo would be great.’ He said, ‘Really? You don’t want me to ask more people?’ ‘No. Literally, you can ask Udo.’”
The pair flew to Kier’s home in Palm Springs, which Williams described as “this library he had bought with all this artwork. You can only imagine some of the amazing artwork he had, [and] he loved Sam right away.”
Of course, there are all those legends of Kier as an unhinged madman who lived as wildly as any of his characters. However, Fayed described him as “an absolute teddy bear. … He was like, ‘They always make me a Nazi or a mad scientist,’ so it was cool to dig into that in the script. Roger’s trying to bare his soul but they’re stuck in a hole, so it’s a little bit Beckett, and so when you’re in a situation like that he had to open himself up a little bit more, which was great.”
That openness didn’t end when the camera stopped rolling, with Kier talking about his own life experiences, including growing up in post-World War II Germany, Fayed said, “He would joke around, ‘Sam, I’ve done a hundred films. Ten of them are great. Thirty are OK when you’re drunk. The rest aren’t great.’ He was just so matter-of-fact but he also had such a kindness to him, and we just connected.”
What no one involved in the film could possibly have known was that this would be Kier’s final performance, as he died last November at the age of 81. Fayed said, “We were absolutely shocked. There were no signs in terms of giving his all that there were any health issues. He was an absolute champ and he gave everything to the role. It was really an honor to work with him.”
“My Beautiful Grave”
World Premiere
Screening as part of Shorts Program 5: Growing Pains, Monday, Nov. 2, 8:55pm, Galaxy Highland.
Austin Film Festival & Writers Conference runs Oct. 28-Nov. 5. Passes and info at austinfilmfestival.com. Read more of the Chronicle’s AFF 2026 coverage here.
