Young Luke Perry Discussed the End of His Life in Resurfaced Video

A resurfaced video of a young Luke Perry shows him discussing his life in an abstract manner and even talking about the end of his life.

The footage, from a 1992 interview with Maria Shriver for NBC‘s First Person, shows a 25-year-old Perry opening up about his plan for sustaining his acting career.

At the time, Perry was starring as hunky bad-boy Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills, 90210; he expressed a twinge of resentment that many were comparing him to James Dean, who died in a car crash at age 24.

“I think that sort of, in a way, if they make the association strong enough, I’ll have to pay the price for the fact that he checked out early. And I don’t want to. I hope to be still working when I’m 30 and 40 and 50 and for however how long I want to,” he said at the time. “I think that when I can no longer fulfill that James Dean fantasy for them, they’ll look and get it from someone else and I’ll be gone.”

Perry said that his dream didn’t fit into his small town of Fredericktown, Ohio, a small village in Knox County just outside of Mansfield.

“I didn’t think I was going anywhere. I want to do something with my life. When my time here is up, I don’t want to look back and see that I didn’t do anything,” Perry said at the time. “And by that I mean I didn’t have any effect on anything else. I see a lot of people who let their life happen to them. And I want to happen to my life. I don’t want my life to happen to me.”

That particular clip has been making its way around the internet, with Star Wars actor Mark Hamill sharing it on Instagram late Monday night. “Too soon… #RIPLukePerry,” Hamill captioned the video.

Elsewhere in the video, Perry commented on how odd his overwhelming success on 90210 felt compared to just a few short years before.

“I felt weird the first time my mother ever saw me step out of a limousine,” he said. “I felt a little guilty, maybe. I felt a little strange.”

“There’s a little bit of uncomfortability that goes with having people who have known you all your life, certainly before any of this ever happened — I’m afraid they’ll look at me and say, ‘Boy, that’s not him.’ And it is me because I don’t change who I am for what I’m doing,” Perry said.

As previously reported, Perry died Monday, several days after suffering a “massive stroke” last week. His publicist said in a statement Monday that Perry was surrounded by family — which included 21-year-old son Jack, 18-year-old daughter Sophie, fiancée Wendy Madison Bauer, ex-wife Minnie Sharp and his siblings — at the time of his death.

Tributes for the late actor have been pouring in from Riverdale and 90210 co-stars alike, as well as others who worked with him or those who simply admired the actor.