Bankrate: You are probably most remembered in this country for your role in "Blade Runner." Oddly, it flopped in the box office before taking on cult status in video.

Rutger Hauer: You just can't quite wrap your mind around it. The whole idea of being known around the world because of VHS and DVD was just developing. Before that, it was all about if your movie ran in the theaters for some time, that would do it, but that didn't happen that much. The funny thing is, my biggest successes were in the year that "Sin City" and "Batman Begins" both hit No. 1 for quite some time. Before that, I'd never really had a movie that would really do well at the box office, but quite a few of them went underground.

Bankrate: How has your career worked out financially for you?

Rutger Hauer: Well, it took some time, but I was making more money than I needed to live on. Even in the early days, when we were making like $200 a month just acting, we could barely make it, the last week of the month was always a bit tricky, but we were able to get by. I've never worried about money, ever.

Bankrate: Do you take an interest in investing your money?

Rutger Hauer: I have no clue. I invested the money that I saved in American stocks, and oddly enough, because Europe is getting so strong in the last five years, the value of that has sort of tumbled into half of what it used to be. I thought at one point of taking it out, but they said that if you take it out now, that's really bad, so yeah. That part, my investments, aren't the greatest thing, basically.

Bankrate: Looking back, would you have chosen different roles?

Rutger Hauer: Uh, no, I don't think so. It so depends on coincidence and moments. I've never been interested in being a movie star. I'm interested in acting and what it is about, and it has been my study over the past 30 years: What does an actor do and how can I improve on it? And I'm putting it to work as a teacher now. I've started in Rotterdam with a small group of filmmakers and basically sort of took the idea from Sundance and linked it up with the digital world of filmmaking and the Internet. I think there is a lot of good hope and freedom to be found there, and I think that future filmmakers will certainly come out of there, too. It's a nice way to put a hand out to them because I feel that, from the inside of filmmaking, it's nice to sort of say, "Come. Come play. Show me your tricks and I'll show you mine and then let's exchange some ideas and make some short films and just practice." What they learn in eight days from me and the experts that join me there is more than they learn in any school, because my focus is instinct, and I haven't seen a school that really works on that. I've really come full circle, doing exactly what my mother and father were doing.

Bankrate: How did you become involved with the Starfish Foundation?

Rutger Hauer: I was shooting a film in the Turks and Caicos Islands and I started reading that AIDS there was No. 2 after Africa. I started to shoot a documentary talking with people in hospitals and just regular people, and what struck me was that they weren't talking much, there was a big taboo on it. The whole stigma on AIDS is enormous and they really had nothing for people who had AIDS, and I thought, "Boy, I wonder if there's anything I can do." Then I struggled with the government there for quite some time because they were stonewalling me, because tourism is their income.

I raised quite a bit of money all around the world, signing autographs, but after more than a year and hundreds of e-mails that went unanswered, I decided to just take the whole thought on the road and simplify what I would do. So now we do things in Africa and Romania, especially in poor countries because they need it most. I would visit orphanages and just get around, do small things for people with AIDS. That's what I'm doing right now because I think I have a hand, I can do it, and I know people I can trust, so I know the money goes where it is supposed to be, rather than getting stuck in bureaucracy. My experience with fundraisers is they cost as much money as they bring. It's really a Catch-22.