The “frightening” scene that almost stopped Uma Thurman from starring in ‘Pulp Fiction’
In 1994, Uma Thurman was forever etched in the minds of cinema audiences as a cultural icon when she starred as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. Images of Thurman in Wallace’s distinctive black wig, cigarette in hand, adorned all the promotional material for Quentin Tarantino’s genre-bending crime classic, and her Oscar-winning performance as the gangster’s moll cemented her stardom forever.
When Tarantino first pitched Thurman the idea of Pulp Fiction, Thurman was a 23-year-old ingenue. Despite making her movie debut in 1987’s Kiss Daddy Goodnight at the tender age of 16, and starring in a further ten films before signing up to Tarantino’s pioneering masterpiece, she still considered herself quite naive to the world and Hollywood. She was obviously interested in playing Wallace, a fascinating and fun spin on the typical femme fatale character from the pulp novels and movies that inspired Tarantino, but his script had several aspects that gave her pause.
Interestingly, though, after giving it some thought, Thurman was able to make her peace with the screenplay’s abundance of profanity and violence. She even talked herself round to getting on board with Wallace’s drug habit, which leads to the iconic – and hugely shocking – scene when she is revived from an overdose by a well-placed adrenaline shot to the heart. Still, one sequence kept tripping her up: the rape of Marsellus Wallace in a pawn shop basement at the hands of the horrifying Zed, all while a prisoner in a gimp suit watched on.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the movie,” Thurman admitted to Vanity Fair when she recalled her objections to the gimp sequence. “Pretty frightening. I was 23, from Massachusetts. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, because I was worried about the Gimp stuff.”
Thankfully, instead of quitting the movie without telling Tarantino about her thought process, Thurman explained her reservations about the scene to the director. At that time, he “wasn’t this revered demigod auteur that he has grown into,” so it took the young filmmaker a lot of time and effort to convince Thurman about the virtues of the gimp scene, and why it needed to be in the movie.
“We had very memorable, long discussions about male rape versus female rape,” Thurman revealed.
Of course, Tarantino was able to persuade his leading lady to make the film, and the rest is history. In fact, she revealed that everyone around her was surprised that she’d let the scene almost put her off the film, as the screenplay was widely regarded as one of the best ever to do the rounds in Hollywood. “No one could believe I even hesitated in any way,” she chuckled. “Neither can I, in hindsight.”
Ironically, by the time it came to actually make the movie, Thurman’s worries about the gimp scene were replaced by a much more immediate fear: dancing with Saturday Night Fever’s John Travolta. Thurman was terrified about the iconic Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance scene with Travolta’s hitman Vincent Vega, “because I was so awkward, embarrassed, and shy”. She didn’t want to look like an idiot next to an experienced dancer like Travolta, but luckily, he coached her through the steps, and cinema magic was made.
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