The Last Dragon (1985) Could’ve Been a Landmark Moment for Mononymous Movie Stars

Reader: I learned a new word recently. It’s always fun to learn a new word, right? And if you read the headline of today’s newsletter, you might’ve learned one too!

If you see the word “mononym” written somewhere, it’s pretty easy to figure it out: “mono” meaning “one,” “nym” meaning name. But if you’d asked me the word for a person with one name, I wouldn’t have immediately come up with it unless you gave me time to break it down. Also, I dare you to say “mononymous” out loud and not think of that Muppets song.*

I learned this new word because I watched The Last Dragon for the first time, during which I was struck by two questions: 1. Who is Taimak? and 2. What happened to Vanity?**

I suppose there’s a good reason I’d never heard of Taimak. If you’re like I was and you haven’t seen The Last Dragon, you wouldn’t know him from Adam (who also went by a mononym). That’s because his acting career…didn’t exactly take off after his feature debut. Five years went by before he did another film in 1990 (something called The White Girl, which is a wild name for a movie), and he only did three more films that decade, two of which look like aspirational pornography based on the posters.***

But I have to give him credit: Taimak came out of the gate shooting for the stars. He was so confident that he dropped his last name and turned his first name into, you guessed it, a mononym. To his credit, there probably aren’t very many Taimaks out there, so I doubt he got confused with anyone else. The same probably can’t be said for his fellow mononymous actor Leon. (Remember Leon? Shouts out to Leon.)

In my heart, I want to believe that Taimak watched Purple Rain just as they wrapped up this shoot and thought to himself “That’s it. That’s what I have to do. One name. My destiny.” I was not alive in 1984 but I bet Prince had dudes all across the country wanting to drop their last names as if they were a ball and chain keeping them from attaining fortune and fame.**** Especially if they had a cool, unique Christian name like Taimak.

Anyway. Purple Rain does have another mononymous connection to The Last Dragon. That would be Vanity, who actually turned down a role in Purple Rain and chose to make her big cinematic debut in The Last Dragon instead. Keeping with the theme here, Prince of course replaced her with the similarly mononymous Apollonia, whom he convinced to use her middle name as a stage name instead of her first (Patricia).*****

Speaking of Prince convincing women to do things, I knew that he and Vanity were together for a brief while, but I did not know how her name came about. As the legend goes, after meeting her at the American Music Awards and deciding that he must have sex with her regularly, Prince invited her to be the lead of a girl group called The Hookers, which is very inappropriate. He also wanted her to go by the mononym “Vagina,” which is also very inappropriate. Together, they settled on Vanity because he considered her to be the female form of himself, which is what every straight man wants in a relationship.******

Vanity’s acting career didn’t exactly take off after The Last Dragon either, though she had more success than poor Taimak did. Just a year later, she appeared in the cult classic Never Too Young to Die as well as an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 52 Pick-Up, a book that I am currently halfway through reading (and have been for about a year now). She was also in Deadly Illusion, a really good Larry Cohen flick, and Action Jackson, a goofy action film that I hear is pretty fun, before retiring in the early 90s and becoming an evangelist (as one does).

So there you have it. We’ve discussed four mononymous actors today over the course of just two films released a year apart. I’ll even throw in an honorable mention for Julius Carry, who has two names like a normal person but did play the mononymous villain Sho’Nuff in The Last Dragon, a film I somehow managed to not discuss at all in today’s newsletter. You’re welcome.

Also, please call me just “Jeremy” from now on.

*Doo dooooo doodoodoo.

**Curiously enough, Taimak’s Wikipedia page describes him as being “known mononymously” whereas the word “mononym” doesn’t come up at all on Vanity’s Wikipedia page. Is it because Taimak goes by his real first name and Vanity chose hers? Is it some weird form of internet sexism? Am I the first and only person to ponder this dichotomy?

***No More Dirty Deals (1993) and Dreamers (1999), the latter of which was shot by the cinematographer who also shot The Blair Witch Project. There’s a fun fact you have no use for.

****I promise I didn’t mean for the second half of this sentence to read like Eminem lyrics.

*****Apparently, Apollonia was dating David Lee Roth during the filming of Purple Rain. This is curious because he has three names instead of one. It must mean something.

******Do not quote me on this.

The Last Dragon is available on HBO Max, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.