From the San Francisco Chronicle. To watch a scene from Kurt Yaeger's forthcoming film, "Tenderloin," go to sfgate.com/ZFJN. For more information about Yaeger's projects, go to http://www.kurtyaeger.com/.Yes, Kurt Yaeger is an amputee. And yes, Kurt Yaeger is an actor.
"But no. I am definitely not an amputee actor," says the San Francisco native, whose athletic build, designer jeans, motorcycle boots and troublemaker smile tend to prove the point.
The only hint of a disability about Yaeger is a slightly groggy expression that he's nursing with coffee at a Mission District cafe on a recent weekday afternoon. He just finished filming his death scene near Redding earlier in the morning for the forthcoming "Hell Patrol" zombie movie.
"If I tell people about my amputated leg while I'm wearing pants, they usually say something like, 'Wow, you're really tough,' " says Yaeger, surrounded by not-so-tough-looking bookworms and skinny skateboarders. "But if I'm wearing shorts and they see my one leg it's more like (adopts hushed sympathetic tone) 'Oh. That really sucks.' "
With a slightly sinister smile, Yaeger, 31, admits that he gets a kick out of being underestimated since losing his left leg in a motorcycle accident in 2006 - and he doesn't mind it when people (including those interviewing him) subconsciously slip in double entendres like asking whether he "gets a kick" out of his almost daily awkward moments.
"You know what?" says Yaeger. "I'm relatively new at being a guy with one leg."
Getting severely injured, however, is nothing new to the former professional BMX stunt rider, who grew up in Daly City and South San Francisco and spent summers at a family cabin near Chico, riding motor bikes and getting into trouble along with his two older brothers.
"How many accidents have I had? Oh, boy," says Yaeger, letting out a short sigh before listing as many broken-bone incidents as he can remember. The list begins when he was 4, riding with his brother on the front of a three-wheel ATC dirt bike. That's when he swung his legs into the front tire, turning his little foot upside down and practically grinding it to bits. He especially remembers the way the rubber
melted into his wounds.
"I've pretty much broken every bone in my body, except for my femurs," he says with a hint of pride.
It was a typical foggy Daly City evening in March 2006 when Yaeger was riding his Ducati Monster 1000 home from a friend's house. While making the same turn he had made probably a hundred times at the John Daly Boulevard exit on southbound Interstate 280, an unknown white vehicle ran him off the road, sending him and his bike down a 30-foot embankment. On the way down he banged into a guardrail and pole.
After about 15 minutes, Yaeger awoke from what he recognized as a concussion. Face down in the dirt, and still able to hear his motorcycle engine humming nearby, he took inventory. The good news: His neck wasn't broken. The bad news: When he tried to crawl, it felt as if his lower half was separating from his pelvis. The lifesaving news: Yaeger's cell phone was in his jacket pocket. With no one in sight, he pulled out the phone and called 911.
"I should be dead," says Yaeger, still with a smile. "That near-death experience is what thrust me into acting. Before, I just kind of fiddled with the idea. After that accident, I changed."Yaeger's father, Timothy Yaeger, a congregation elder for many years at the Peninsula Christian Fellowship church in San Bruno, saw the same change.
Watching him lie in an induced coma with a collapsed lung, torn bladder and broken pelvis for three weeks at San Francisco General Hospital, Timothy Yaeger wondered how his son would respond to the news that his leg would have to be amputated.
"Kurt was never a woe-is-me kind of person," says the elder Yaeger. "He was always talented and driven. But after the accident, he took on an entirely new kind of aggressive personality. Nothing was going to bring him down, and he was going to attack whatever life gave him."
Although Yaeger was released from the hospital about three months after the accident, it took nearly 25 surgeries before the doctors finally determined how far up his leg needed to be amputated.
Complications and nearly unbearable pain aside, Yaeger dedicated his new lease on life to acting. In the past year and a half since he began walking again, Yaeger has acted in several commercials and landed lead roles in locally produced feature films due for release next year, including "Hell Patrol" and Michael Anderson's "Tenderloin." He now splits his time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Depending on the audition description and whether or not Yaeger is feeling a little mischievous, sometimes he lets the casting director know about his amputated leg and sometimes he doesn't.
"I had absolutely no idea," says Anderson, who auditioned Yaeger in "Tenderloin," an independent film (on coincidentally named Fake Foot Productions) about a wounded Iraq war veteran who comes to San Francisco and ends up managing an SRO hotel in the Tenderloin. "I just thought that he was a natural. I believed everything he was saying during the audition. He didn't sound like an actor, yet he was reading our lines."
After impressing Anderson with his acting, Yaeger jumped from standing to his knees atop a dresser to act out a mouse-chasing scene.
"Before making the jump, Kurt goes, 'I can also do this,' " says Anderson. "I'm thinking, big deal. Then when we realized he had only one leg, it was like, 'Wow!' "
Yaeger credits the near-death experience for his positive attitude. "I don't have a fear of death anymore," he says. "So I don't have a fear of looking foolish in front of the camera."
Yaeger is also getting involved with rights for disabled actors. He cites a statistic from a 2005 Screen Actors Guild study showing that while nearly 20 percent of Americans have some sort of disability, less than 2 percent of characters on television are shown with one, and only a half percent of those have speaking parts.
Yaeger hopes that little-known monetary incentives and tax breaks given to films for casting disabled actors will help the cause and break stereotypes. He is helping to get that word out. But the perception of what it truly means to be disabled is something Yaeger continues to work on.
"I was shooting a background Afghan refugee camp scene for 'Charlie Wilson's War,' and there were all these guys with missing limbs," says Yaeger of the scene, which didn't make the final cut. "I was looking at them thinking, 'Man, that sucks for them!' Then I realized, 'Oh wait, I'm an amputee too.'"