Eli Damaskinos

"Make no mistake, Nyssa! Those blood ties mean nothing to me when measured against the ascendancy of our race. Who do you think God really favors in the web? The spider, or the fly!?"

- Eli Damaskinos mocks Nyssa for berating him out of his ambition

Overlord Eli Damaskinos is the Bigger Bad/secondary antagonist in the 2002 film Blade II. He is the father of Nyssa and Jared Nomak.

He is portrayed by Thomas Krestchmann, who also portrays Baron Wolfgang von Strucker and Timothy Cain.

Background
Damaskinos is an elder vampire of Greek descent. He is centuries old and claims to have fathered thousands of children, among them are Nyssa and Jared Nomak. Desiring for the ways for ascending the vampirekinds to the point that they no longer possesses their hereditary weaknesses (in the other words, possesses attributes that the titular hero have), he started the experiment where he recombines vampiric DNA, in which the DNA itself taken from his own. The recombined DNA would later fused with regular vampire virus's DNA, resulting any human that infected with the altered vampire virus would became vampire with new attributes that the regular type of their kind lacks with. The earliest was Jared, whom happened to his own son.

It's unknown whether at that moment Jared was born with altered vampire virus' DNA or he previously born as regular vampire like Eli that later administrated with recombined vampire virus, but in either way, Jared eventually became powerful and also the first of the Reaper Strains. But at a price: his thrist for blood was more unstable than that of the regular vampires', which made him rebels against Eli and runaway, sought revenge for what has happened on him.

Personality
Though it was shown that he cared about vampire race(as he made the uneasy alliance between the titular hero and his men called Bloodpack), this later revealed not above sacrificing them, including his daughter Nyssa as well as turned Nomak into one of Reaper Strain. He sought for ascension of vampires where they can immune to their natural weakness like Blade, and sacrifice anyone to do so.

Trivia

 * Damaskinos originally had long white hair. But was removed in the finished film because, according to Guillermo del Toro, the hair made him look like Michael Bolton.