Why Matt Dillon turned down Quentin Tarantino and ‘Pulp Fiction’
The 1994 crime film Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino is absolutely brimming with iconic moments and characters, one of whom is undoubtedly Butch Coolidge, famously played by Bruce Willis. However, Willis was not always meant to play the part, and Tarantino had actually written it for Matt Dillon.
Dillon, for one reason or another, decided against playing Butch, although in hindsight, perhaps this is something he regrets. Tarantino once explained why Dillon was not keen on playing Butch in his crime classic on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast.
“So what happened was I originally wrote the part for Matt Dillon because he was a fan of my script for Reservoir Dogs,” he said. Following the release of Tarantino’s feature-length debut in 1992, many ears in Hollywood pricked up for the production of his follow-up. However, the studio Tarantino signed with had a clause that meant he had to hire actors of a certain calibre to allure audiences to the cinema.
Tarantino continued: “We’d made a deal with Miramax and part of the deal with them was that we have an ensemble cast, but we need at least one, if not two, approved Miramax actors in the cast. We can cast anybody as long as we have somebody they considered a name they could sell. Matt Dillon fell into the name category that they would accept.”
The director must have thought that Dillon was in the bag, seeing as he was already a fan of Tarantino’s first movie, but that proved not to be the case. “I wrote it for Matt, and it seemed like it was going to be easy getting him,” Tarantino added. “But he read it, and he wasn’t so sure about it”.
There was something in the character of Butch that Dillon was not so keen on, and it largely consisted of the way Tarantino would tell his story. “He wanted to see Butch actually boxing,” Tarantino said. “Maybe he didn’t 100% get it. And he also wanted to play the Vincent character. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes.”
There were several actors who wanted to play Vincent in Pulp Fiction, which had, of course, already gone to John Travolta, and then Tarantino offered Butch to Bruce Willis, even though he suggested that he too would rather play Vincent. But in the end, though, Willis took on the role of the sentimental boxer in one of his greatest performances, leaving Dillon to ruminate on what might have been.
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