The story of how Quentin Tarantino convinced Tim Roth to audition for ‘Reservoir Dogs’
Working with a first-time director is a risk that not every established actor is willing to take, but for Tim Roth, it opened the door to a beautiful and long-lasting professional partnership.
One of the actor’s first major roles in an American production came with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, which saw the star immediately welcomed into the filmmaker’s repertory. Since then, he’s appeared in Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, and The Hateful Eight, but it took some liquid courage to get him to audition for Mr. Orange in the first place.
At the time, Roth wasn’t making a deliberate movie to break into the United States market, not that he was against the idea if it happened naturally. “Americans make films about their own country, whatever kind of dishevelled state it’s in,” he explained in early 1993. “They at least do it, whether it’s good or bad.”
Admitting that “you get a stack of scripts sent to you” regardless of whether or not there’s any vested interest on his part, Roth anointed Reservoir Dogs as “the first refreshing thing I’d read that had real energy or something new about it.”
He didn’t meet with Tarantino for the first time until after Harvey Keitel had signed on as Mr. White and a co-producer, but even when he did, he refused to read for Mr. Orange in their presence because he believed himself to be “crap” at auditions.
When he and Tarantino pitched up at a nearby bar for some drinks, which was then followed by a trip to the off-licence before more drinks at Roth’s abode, he suddenly found himself hooked. Conceding that with a few beers in him, he “proceeded to read the entire script, every part in it about ten times because we were both hammered by then.”
As he told Entertainment Weekly, regardless of how plied with alcohol he may have been, Roth knew he had to be a part of Reservoir Dogs. “Within 20 pages, I was going, ‘Oh, I want to be in this,’” he said. “It’s so beautifully written. It’s so keenly and intelligently written. And it’s also very funny.”
Roth was already a well-known name prior to Reservoir Dogs that Tarantino wanted for the cast, so he may not have auditioned his way out of landing the role of Mr. Orange were he to give an audition as ‘crap’ as the one he was convinced was inevitable, but getting tanked with the director proved to be the perfect solution to his hesitance.
He was all-in from the moment he read the screenplay in its entirety, with the end result a classic of 1990s independent cinema that endures more than 30 years later as one of the most noteworthy, memorable, and endlessly quotable performances of Roth’s entire career.
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