The actor Quentin Tarantino can’t stand watching: “I find his performance physically repellent”
If there’s a difference between an actor playing a repellent character and an actor giving a repellent performance, Quentin Tarantino found out what it was during his first viewing of a classic crime story he otherwise had nothing but the highest praise for.
As someone who knows how to coax a great performance out of a sprawling cast, the two-time Academy Award winner is aware that every role, no matter how big or small it may be, needs to be played in line with the overall tone of the film, whether he’s rewriting history or lopping off body parts with a samurai sword.
For the most part, Tarantino doesn’t usually speak ill of actors because he’s got the utmost respect and admiration for the profession, even if his own dreams of succeeding as a thespian were repeatedly thwarted because everyone except him quickly realised that he wasn’t very good at it.
With Clint Eastwood being one of his favourite actors and the star of his favourite movie, Tarantino appreciates Hollywood’s coolest stars. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that he’s also full of praise for Steve McQueen, and he dived into two ‘King of Cool’ classics in his book, Cinema Speculation.
Bullitt and The Getaway are placed under the microscope, but there’s one aspect of the latter that he couldn’t abide. As much as he admires the film and McQueen’s work in it, praising him for a “very internal performance” that’s “very real and very deeply felt,” one of his co-stars doesn’t get a passing grade.
The story, concocted by the early 1970s action thriller dream team of director Sam Peckinpah and writer Walter Hill, tracks McQueen’s Doc McCoy as he tries to reach a bargain with Ben Johnson’s corrupt parole board member, Jack Benyon, who ultimately betrays him and forces him to head off on the run alongside Ali MacGraw’s Carol and a stack of stolen cash.
One of Benyon’s goons, Rudy Butler, is played by character actor and The Godfather veteran Al Lettieri. His contributions to The Getaway involve murder, kidnapping, extramarital sex, and eventually death. However, Tarantino thinks Lettieri went a little too far in playing an irredeemably and morally bankrupt antagonist.
“Speaking of the Rudy storyline, I’m not a fan,” he wrote. “I really don’t like Lettieri in the role. It’s not that he’s a bad actor or gives a bad performance. It’s more I find his performance physically repellent. Now, for a character like Rudy, that should be a good thing, no? No. It’s still a movie. I still should want to watch the movie and enjoy it.”
From Tarantino’s perspective, “certain actors can play grotesque bad guys yet they still have a connection to the audience,” something he’s adamant that Lettieri failed to understand: “They do cruel deeds, they’re monsters, but we enjoy their monsters becayse when they’re onscreen we know something exciting will happen.”
As far as he’s concerned, Rudy is a monster just for the sake of being a monster, and it turns his stomach.
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