Gene Simmons

The Demon was a costume, and for a stretch of the 1980s it doubled as a resume. Gene Simmons, born in Haifa in 1949, co-founded Kiss in 1973 with Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, played bass, sang, and stayed in the band alongside Stanley until it wound up in 2023. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 as a member of Kiss.

The film work started exactly where you would expect. Casting directors looked at the tongue, the boots and the face paint and offered villains: Dr. Charles Luther in the 1984 thriller Runaway, the gloriously named Velvet Von Ragnar in Never Too Young to Die, Malak Al Rahim in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Nuke in Trick or Treat. He is not a subtle actor and none of those parts asked him to be. What he does have is scale and a voice pitched lower than anyone else in the cast, which is precisely what a mid-budget genre picture needs from its heavy.

Later he mostly played himself, which turned out to be the better long-running role: a cameo as Kiss in Detroit Rock City, a self-parody in Extract, the reality series Gene Simmons: Family Jewels from 2006 to 2012, the Demon in animated form for a Scooby-Doo crossover. He writes too, and he has spent decades being unembarrassed about the commerce of all of it, which is either the least interesting thing about him or the only thing, depending on how much Kiss you own.