The only actor who managed to embarrass Quentin Tarantino: “I wanna hide under the carpet”
As you may have noticed, Quentin Tarantino isn’t a man who embarrasses easily, with the filmmaker every bit as confident in his abilities behind the camera as he is in spouting his unfiltered opinions.
He’s even been known to speak confidently about his acting, which underlines just how sure of himself he is, since he’s guaranteed to give the worst performance in any Quentin Tarantino movie he appears in, and he’s got a decent chance of repeating the trick when anyone else is at the helm.
That’s why his criticism of other actors gets under the skin more than when he’s trashing other people’s movies. Even if you don’t like them, Tarantino is objectively very good at his job, since he’s got two Academy Awards for screenwriting and is one of modern cinema’s most influential and imitated auteurs.
In front of the camera, though, he’s shite, which he refused to believe to such an extent that he thought he could do a decent job on Broadway. Shockingly, he did not. The point is, it takes something or someone truly special to make someone as self-assured as the Pulp Fiction creator want the ground to open up and swallow him whole, which is probably why it’s only happened once.
In the mid-1990s, back when he was trying to prove that he could write and direct his own pictures while also performing in other people’s without disgracing himself, he played the title role in Destiny Turns on the Radio, which proved everyone else right when it turned out to be a risible box office bomb.
“I was acting in a movie in Vegas, and it turned out that during that time, Scorsese was doing Casino in Vegas,” he explained on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast. “I’d never really met Martin Scorsese before, and so I got an invite to visit the set of Casino.” A big moment for Tarantino, but one that he quickly regretted.
When he was “walking to meet the wizard,” as he put it, Don Rickles appeared. The abrasive comedian, who played Billy Sherbert in Scorsese’s crime flick, didn’t waste any time in making the new kid on the block feel as uncomfortable as possible when he was in the presence of a master.
“Quentin! Thank god you’re here!” Rickles bellowed. “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing at all! Thank god a real director has finally shown up, this cat is out of it! Please save us, this is a disaster! A disaster! Please save us from this wreckage! You are a talented man, we need your talent!”
All he wanted to do was swing by the set, but the comic turned it into an ordeal, with Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and the crew all pissing themselves laughing. “I wanna hide under the carpet,” he recalled of his feelings in the moment. “Cold sweat.” It takes a lot to embarrass Tarantino, but Rickles made it look easy.
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