The reason why Quentin Tarantino cast Bruce Willis in ‘Pulp Fiction’
One of Bruce Willis’ crowning moments as an actor came when he played the sentimental boxing champ Butch Coolidge in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 crime masterpiece Pulp Fiction. Willis, alongside John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, to name but a few stars, helped to make Tarantino’s movie what it is. After all, just what is a film without its actors?
On the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, Tarantino explained how he cast Bruce Willis in the iconic role. “That ended up being a very interesting story. I mean, we weren’t going out to Bruce Willis,” Tarantino began. “He was one of the top five, if not three, biggest stars in the world. He’s the man. So what happened was I originally wrote the part for Matt Dillon because he was a fan of my script for Reservoir Dogs.”
The director 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.”
Given the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino thought that selling Pulp Fiction to Dylan would be an easy pitch. However, it didn’t turn out that way. “I wrote it for Matt, and it seemed like it was going to be easy getting him. But he read it, and he wasn’t so sure about it,” the director said. “He wanted to see Butch actually boxing. 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.”
All of a sudden, Tarantino didn’t have what he calls a “go-movie” any longer. However, it just so happened that Harvey Keitel was in Los Angeles shooting at the time, and he invited Tarantino over to his rented house in Malibu. Bruce Willis actually only lived a few houses away from the rented place and also turned up at Keitel’s party. Tarantino thought it was the perfect opportunity to find his Matt Dillon replacement.
As it transpired, not only was Willis a huge fan of Reservoir Dogs, but Keitel had already told him about the new Pulp Fiction script and that Tarantino would be coming by to hang out. Tarantino went on, “Little did I know, he had already read Pulp Fiction by the time I showed up at Harvey’s house.”
“He goes, ‘Hey Quentin, take a walk with me to my house. I want to introduce you to Demi [Moore]’. We’re walking along, and he goes, ‘Listen, I read your script, the new one.’ That blew my mind. He goes, ‘I want to play Vincent’. I go, well, I kinda have John Travolta set up to play Vincent.'”
It seemed like just about everybody wanted to play Vincent Vega, but Willis admitted to Travolta’s excellence and not wanting to “fuck him up”. Willis then suggested that he play Jules, which Tarantino said was a “hard decision” to make, but ultimately, of course, he decided on Samuel L. Jackson.
Tarantino said that getting a big star like Willis wanting to play two roles in the film was “like winning the fucking lottery, but it’s just not right”. Detailing further, he continued: “I told him the part that would be great for him was Butch. I see him as a 1950s leading man. Read the script one more time with the idea of you playing Butch, and if you don’t respond, that’s fine.”
When Tarantino called Willis the following day, he said: “Quentin, the shortest sentence in the Bible is ‘Jesus wept’. The shortest sentence in Hollywood is ‘I’m in.’ And I’m in.” And that’s how Willis came to play one in one of the greatest crime films of all time and proves what a great actor he is as well as a great man.
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