How Quentin Tarantino was cast in an award-winning spy series: “It lives up to the coolness”
When it comes to writing and directing, Quentin Tarantino is one of the very best in the business, but the same can’t be said about his semi-regular forays into acting.
As great as he is when it comes to crafting iconic dialogue for other characters to say, the sentiment doesn’t really apply when he’s the one speaking it. That hasn’t prevented him from popping up on-screen in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and most egregiously Django Unchained, though, while it’s hard to believe he hired himself in From Dusk Till Dawn for any other reason beyond sucking on Salma Hayek’s toes.
Outside of films he’s been directly involved with in a creative capacity – or lending a favour to friend Robert Rodriguez by guest starring in Desperado – he’s rarely shown up in projects that he doesn’t have a direct connection to as characters other than himself. Adam Sandler’s Little Nicky is a big-screen exception, with J.J. Abrams’ spy series Alias the outlier on the small screen.
Of course, Tarantino famously swung by The Golden Girls as an Elvis impersonator, but since becoming one of cinema’s leading lights in the post-Reservoir Dogs era, the Jennifer Garner-fronted espionage adventure is the one and only live-action episodic TV show he’s ever lent his name to as an on-camera performer only.
Two-parter ‘The Box’ comprised the 12th and 13th episodes of Alias‘ first season, with Tarantino hamming it up as McKenas Cole, a former agent of the SD6 agency who was left for dead on a previous mission. Now back and seeking revenge, he takes over the building to steal a mysterious artefact on behalf of unnamed villain ‘The Man’, only for Garner’s Sydney Bristow to throw a spanner into the works.
His performance is not great to put it lightly, and his fight scene with Garner is a minor miracle of editing. He’s got no screen presence, no coordination, and no charisma, so props must go to the post-production and choreography team to salvage something out of it. Rolling Stone wasn’t even allowed to watch his fight sequence ahead of time, which says it all. “If you were in there, you’d know why,” was the reason given by a crew member, neatly encapsulating Tarantino’s natural gifts for hand-to-hand combat.
How he ended up in the Golden Globe and four-time Primetime Emmy-winning Alias is simple: creator J.J. Abrams heard he was a huge fan and invited him to be a part of it. In fact, Tarantino waxed lyrical about the show on a number of occasions, saying it “delivers what The Man from U.N.C.L.E. always promised; it actually lives up to the coolness of its potential.”
Not only that, but Tarantino praised Garner because “week in and week out, Jennifer is doing fights in tight rubber dresses and heels, so really, props”. Ironically, the time she kicked his ass is one of the weakest scraps across the entirety of Alias‘ five-season run, but he was such a huge fan that his character was nonetheless brought back twice more in the third run of episodes.
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