Quentin Tarantino’s perverse obsession with proving himself as an actor: “I think I kick ass”
Is Quentin Tarantino a good actor? Most sensible people would say no, simply because he’s had plenty of chances to prove himself, and despite boasting dozens of credits to his name as an on-camera performer, he’s never shown any visible signs of improvement.
Does Quentin Tarantino think he’s a good actor? Of course he does. There’s no shame in having confidence in your abilities, which the filmmaker has always possessed in spades. However, nobody’s going to disagree that his strengths don’t lie in delivering a convincing performance.
The lifelong cinephile originally dreamed of succeeding as a thespian before wisely pivoting to filmmaking, although those residuals from playing an Elvis Presley impersonator in The Golden Girls did come in handy when he was trying to make a name for himself as a writer and director.
From cringeworthy cameos in his own pictures to an ill-advised stint on Broadway, Tarantino has never wavered in his belief that he’s got real acting chops. The downside is that because he thinks that way, he’ll continue to accept acting gigs because he’s well-connected enough to keep getting parts, even though he’s never been so much as halfway good in anything.
Once Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction combined to make him the most important new voice in American cinema in the 1990s, Tarantino doubled down on his acting. He played minor characters in both of those masterpieces, and supplemented it with parts in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, the title role in Destiny Turns on the Radio, From Dusk till Dawn, Little Nicky, and the TV series Alias.
The unifying theme, other than Tarantino’s presence, was that he uniformly sucked. Crying foul, he even suggested that because he’d become such a big name in the industry as an auteur, critics were out to get him by savaging his acting for no other reason than to knock him down a peg or two.
“I think I’m really funny in that movie, I think I kick ass,” he told Richard Biskind of his Desperado turn before turning on his detractors. “It’s not about me being bad, but ‘We just don’t wanna see his face anymore’. They’re not gonna give me a break for another couple of years on this. They almost resent the fact that I want to act.”
Here’s a thought: Maybe they don’t resent him for wanting to act; maybe they resent him for continuing to act when he’s so bad at it. The two-time Academy Award winner has had enough chances to prove himself, and the fact that he’s still incapable of mastering the basics indicates that they’re not out to get him; he’s just terrible.
“Until I keep doing it and doing it and shoving it down their throats, then maybe they’ll look at it for what it is,” he declared. That sounds more like a threat than anything else, but at least he didn’t feel compelled to shoehorn himself into The Hateful Eight or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so perhaps the lesson is finally being learned.
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