Kane Hodder knows he might sound ridiculous. He knows people might roll their eyes and stop taking him seriously. But when it comes to Jason Voorhees, the fictional cold-blooded killer who’s haunted movie screens for 40 years now, he doesn’t mince words. “I felt from the beginning that I was born to play this character,” he says. “It seemed so easy.”

While understanding how strange it is to say that portraying a vengeful, murderous man-child—one wrapped in prosthetics, disguised by a hockey mask, armed with a machete—is his destiny, Hodder can explain. Bullied as a child and frequently delinquent as a teenager, he channeled his upbringing and penchant for mischief by enrolling in a school for stuntmen in Santa Monica. Five years later, when Friday the 13th premiered in 1980 and introduced the tale of a tormented boy at summer camp who drowns because of his counselors’ neglect, Hodder subconsciously recognized the parallels to his own origin story. “I was such a huge fan of that character,” he says. “I always identified with Jason because of that. I guess in a way, even [he] is a success story of overcoming terrible things being done to you.”

As Jason returned from the dead and grew into an indestructible killing machine in subsequent sequels, Hodder’s career as a stuntman flourished. Then, things clicked. While working as a stunt coordinator on the 1987 crime drama Prison, Hodder impressed makeup supervisor John Carl Buechler during a brief performance in prosthetics. A year later, when Buechler was tapped to direct Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, he wanted Hodder to take over as Jason. The script featured a variety of stunts, including a fire sequence, that made him ideal for the role. “This is a character that is known around the world,” says Hodder. “You can imagine how much of an honor I felt that was.”

[Read Jake Kring-Schreifels's piece about the nine men who've portrayed the iconic Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise.]