The most miscast actor in the world is still one of the best, claims Quentin Tarantino
If you wanted to find out who the best actors in history are, you’ve got a couple of options. Type it into google or chatgpt and see what it spits out at you. Maybe search IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes and see what lists they come up with. But the best and most sensible thing to do would simply be to call Quentin Tarantino up and ask him.
That’s because if ever there were a student of film, a man with a truly encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema and its different genres and the finest actors to perfect the craft, then it’s Tarantino, one of the greatest movie directors in all of cinema.
His astonishing understanding of the medium partly comes from his youth, where he spent some five years working at a video store in California called Video Archives, resulting in everyone he knew asking him for recommendations. It also led to his first proper job in films when a colleague brought him on to the Dolph Lundgren exercise promo Maximum Potential.
But Tarantino was already an obsessive by that point; he had spent the 1970s accompanying his parents to weekly screenings, he had already written his first screenplay, and in terms of heritage, his name is even partly based on Burt Reynolds’ character ‘Quint’ from the long-running western Gunsmoke.
The results of his fascination with the greats of cinema, Kurosawa, Scorsese, and Godard, were immediately evident from his first movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, while his love of cult cinema and independent films inspired later works, including Kill Bill and Jackie Brown.
Over the course of his career, he, like many directors, has established a roster of favourite actors he prefers to work with, casting them in several films. Key among them are Samuel L Jackson (six movies), Michael Madsen (five) and Tim Roth, with four appearances.
But one huge movie star that hasn’t appeared in a Tarantino film is Nicolas Cage, despite the director telling The Village Voice back in 1996 that he viewed the Wild at Heart star as one of his favourite actors of his generation. He explained: “I don’t think I’ve seen another actor in the history of film that made a career of being miscast and rising to the occasion.”
Indeed, so great is Tarantino’s admiration for Cage that two crew members on Kill Bill are even listed as The Rock (1996 Cage action flick) and ‘Nic Cage’. Tarantino has also continued to express his feelings up until quite recently, describing Cage’s 2021 movie Pig as one of the best movies he had seen in the previous five years.
Cage, for his part, has also described a desire to be cast in one of Tarantino’s films. Back in 2015 he told Newsweek: “Quentin Tarantino and I, the two of us could really do something quite special. But I remain positive and hopeful that it will eventually happen.”
The partnership could have happened in 1994, when Tarantino considered Cage for the role of a drug dealer in his Oscar-winning crime caper Pulp Fiction, but that part eventually went to Eric Stoltz.
While Tarantino only ever releases projects now and again to great fanfare, Cage has been very prolific late in his career and has earned considerable plaudits. He was rightly lauded for his fantastic work on the detective-horror Longlegs for A24 last year, and he’ll shortly be seen in another shocker, The Carpenter’s Son, which is set in Egypt. He’ll also be starring in Spider-Noir, a black and white Marvel comic book series due to hit streaming sites in 2026.
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