Everyone knows about world-class rock guitarist and top hat enthusiast Saul "Slash" Hudson's axe-slinging exploits with Guns N‘ Roses, Velvet Revolver and as a lone, hard-rocking wolf (when he opens for Ozzy Osbourne on Saturday, it will be a sans-"snakepit" solo performance), but seldom is Slash the Actor discussed. The man's appeared in everything from The Anna Nicole Show to the rockumentary Anvil!, and what follows is a survey of some of his other notable onscreen appearances.

Sid and Nancy (1986)

Officially, Slash is credited as an extra in Alex Cox's mid-1980s biopic of punk legends Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, but as he explains in his eponymous autobiography, he mostly avoided the cameras: "For three days, they shot these ‘Sex Pistols' scenes at the Starwood, a club that I knew inside and out. I'd show up in the morning, clock in and get my meal ticket, then disappear into the bowels of the Starwood and get drunk on Jim Beam all by myself. While the other extras were doing their part playing audience members ... I watched the proceedings from a hidden corner of the mezzanine - and got paid the same wage."

The Dead Pool (1988)

A case could be made that Slash's wordless cameo in The Dead Pool (the fifth and final Dirty Harry film) is crucial to the overall narrative. He and the rest of GN‘R appear in two scenes: first, as musicians attending a funeral for smack-addled rocker Johnny Squares (played by a young Jim Carrey, whose lip-syncing to "Welcome to the Jungle" is one of the film's most memorable sequences), and then as extras in the movie-within-a-movie being shot by horror director Peter Swan (Liam Neeson). This is a nice bit of sleight meta-commentary, since, as Slash reveals in Slash, "on occasion, Axl and I took jobs together as extras on movie sets." More important, however, is that in the latter scene, Slash shoots an enormous fucking harpoon gun, which, apart from being totally awesome, establishes the weapon and the means by which Harry Callahan will literally skewer the film's villain in the closing minutes.

Tales from the Crypt - "In the Groove" (1994)

Slash has all of six lines in this installment of the "spooky" ‘90s TV series based on the old EC Comics horror title (notes a commenter on a YouTube bootleg of the episode, "He spoke his (lines) very easily. He did a nice job and was very believable. And he didn't kill anyone or become psychotic!"). In it, Slash plays "Hank Bodine," a radio DJ whose drive-time success is a source of grief for protagonist "Gary" - a horndog on-air personality played by character actor Miguel Ferrer (Robocop, Twin Peaks). Since Slash is no master thesp, his appearance here is just as unremarkable as the episode itself.

That said, the fact that Slash's Hank Bodine resembles Slash exactly (sleeveless denim shirt, mop of frizzy hair, top hat) calls to mind alternate/parallel realities and William James' concept of the "multiverse." If there are countless other realities, similar to our own save for a single quantum event, it stands to reason that there would be a Saul Hudson in each permutation of reality; each one would dress the same, and only their names would change throughout the realities. Sometimes they'd be Slash, sometimes Hank, sometimes "Musician at Funeral" and sometimes "Miss America Bag Lady Pageant Host."

Slash

with Ozzy Osbourne
Saturday, Feb. 5, 7:30 p.m., $29.50 at Ticketmaster
Tacoma Dome, 2727 E. D St., Tacoma
253.272.3663