The actor Quentin Tarantino promised he’d write a movie for and lied: “He’s going to get to you”
Like most auteurs who have the creative freedom and status to work with almost any actor they want, Quentin Tarantino writes a lot of his characters with a specific person in mind. He’s been doing it for years, but as one of them discovered, he can sometimes lie through his teeth about it.
Reservoir Dogs was the only time that Tarantino wasn’t able to hand-pick his own cast, and each actor still felt tailor-made for their role. From that point on, virtually every major character in his subsequent eight features was scripted with the intention of being played by the person he’s imagining in his head.
Of course, there are the rare names who turn him down, with Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke ruling themselves out of two Tarantino pictures apiece, and he even met with Tyrese Gibson when he was developing Django Unchained, even though there’s surely no way he was seriously in the running.
Another of his favourite tricks is to take an actor who’d been consigned to the irrelevancy bin and give their career a shot in the arm, a trick he’s pulled with a number of fallen stars over the years. He promised he would do the same with Michelle Johnson, but he pretty much lied to her face after their meeting.
After making her screen debut in Michael Caine’s awful 1984 comedy, Blame It on Rio, she didn’t become a star. Instead, Johnson played bit parts in supporting roles across film and television, including a 1996 episode of The Outer Limits as the wife of a man who becomes increasingly disgusted every time he touches, smells, or even sees her, which is because she’d been replaced by an alien doppelganger.
She encountered Tarantino at a party and thought her star was set to rise. “He stopped, kind of pointed his finger at me, and said, ‘Michelle Johnson? Blame it on Rio Michelle Johnson? You’re a fan of mine? I am a bigger fan of yours!” she recalled to Cryptic Rock, with the director unsurprisingly rattling off a list of her credits, including Death Becomes Her and Tales from the Crypt.
“He then said, ‘My favourite thing you have ever done is the Outer Limits episode,'” Johnson explained. “I said, ‘Wow, you saw that?’ He said, ‘Not only did I see it, I want to make a feature film out of it and star you in it; call my office.'” That’s not an offer many people in Hollywood would turn down, but that was when the trouble started.
Johnson “called one of his main producers at the time and spoke with him,” who relayed her message to Tarantino. Unfortunately, that’s as far as it went. “He said, ‘Quentin said to be patient, he’s going to get to you,'” she reflected. “I said, ‘Wow, that is kind of amazing, but what does that mean?’ He said, ‘Well, he said the same thing to John Travolta, and look how that turned out for John Travolta.'”
In reality, it was all bullshit, which didn’t stop her from refusing to abandon all hope. “I am still waiting for Quentin Tarantino,” she opined. “Be my hero, Quentin! All these years later, I am still waiting.” Since he promised to write her an Outer Limits movie two decades ago, it still hasn’t happened, and he’s only got one more film left before calling it quits; maybe Johnson shouldn’t hold her breath.
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