The classic 1978 movie Quentin Tarantino lied about acting in: “He looks like he could be me”
If Quentin Tarantino was even a tenth as good at acting as he is at writing or directing, then there’s every chance his Hollywood career could have unfolded completely differently.
The two-time Academy Award winner grew up with dreams of conquering the silver screen from in front of the camera, but he was always held back by the inarguable fact that he’s shit at it. Fortunately, he was much better on the other side, but he still finds ways to curse the industry with atrocious performances.
He’s either ignorant, oblivious, or an idiot to make such a song and dance about trashing Paul Dano and Matthew Lillard for their performative chops when the worst actor in any given Quentin Tarantino movie is usually Quentin Tarantino, but because he’s a big name, people continue to give him work anyway.
The filmmaker let his ego go to his head and became convinced that he had the talent to play a leading role on Broadway, and it was a disaster on every level. However, because he’s doing everything apart from making that tenth and final feature of his, he’s been bitten by the bug again, which seems more of a means to make excuses for keeping his finger up his arse, because he hasn’t gotten any better at acting.
Before the internet came along, nobody bothered or had a way of double-checking what an aspiring thespian had on their CV, so a lot of them would make things up to pad them out. Tarantino did it more than once, and in addition to falsely claiming that he had a background role in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 adaptation of King Lear, he also lied about being in one of the most important movies of the 1970s.
Was George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead a transformative moment, not just for the horror genre, but American cinema? It was. Does it still hold up almost 50 years later as the greatest zombie flick ever made, and one of the most influential of its era? Absolutely. Did it star Quentin Tarantino as a biker? Did it fuck. And yet, he spent a long time suggesting otherwise.
“There’s a young man in the movie,” he explained. “There’s one of the motorcycle guys. He’s got shaggy hair, like I had at the time, and he’s got a Tommy gun, and he’s in the sidecar of the motorcycle apparatus. And the guy doesn’t really look like me, but he looks like he could be me. He has the same kind of brown hair. I was wearing leather all the time, and we were more or less the same age.”
Naturally, Tarantino decided to tell people it was him, and they had no way to prove otherwise. He gave up the ghost eventually, and thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it takes seconds to find out that the shaggy-haired fella in the sidecar was actually played by the late Larry Vaira, and not the guy who wrote and directed Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Things did eventually come full circle in 2007, though, when Tarantino genuinely worked with Romero by making a voice-only cameo as a newsreader in Diary of the Dead. So did Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and Wes Craven, but the difference was that none of them had lied about doing it already.
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