Uma Thurman’s response to the Fall Out Boy song named after her
Several songs in the history of music have been named after famous actors. Take, for instance, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ by Bauhaus or ‘Joan Crawford’ by Blue Oyster Cult. Another came from the pop-punk icons Fall Out Boy with their 2015 track ‘Uma Thurman‘.
The track had initially incorporated a section of the theme tune from the classic 1960s sitcom The Munsters. However, the final product appeared to be reminiscent of the mood of Quentin Tarantino’s beloved movie Pulp Fiction and particularly the film’s use of a surf rock song by Dick Dale. As such, the band decided to name the track after one of the film’s iconic actors.
Bassist Pete Wentz explained: “The thing that I like about a lot of the characters Uma Thurman has played is that she picks these quirky, yet powerful roles. When we were writing the song, I’d play it for people and a lot of them immediately thought ‘Pulp Fiction‘. But to me, I felt like it was more her character in Kill Bill. It’s iconic [and] vengeful; that’s the character I thought of when we were writing the song. If you grew up at all in the ’90s, it’s hard not to crush on a woman like Uma Thurman.”
He added: “The track came before the song. We had the track, and we were playing it to people. We had the tracks done, and we were playing them to people, and people kept saying, ‘Oh, Pulp Fiction‘ or ‘Oh, Dick Dale’. Like this surfy guitar idea. Because of that, we were like, why don’t we write something that’s in the Quentin Tarantino world?”
Once the mood of the track was established, there was only one thing left to do — get permission from the legendary actor to use her name as the song’s title. Fortunately, Thurman was more than happy to oblige, and the tune would go down in FOB folklore.
Wentz elaborated: “The Uma Thurman melody idea came up, and we were like, ‘okay, now we’ll reach out to Uma and see if she’s down with us doing this because otherwise, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure it out.’ I don’t know how she really feels about the song, but she’s okay about naming it ‘Uma Thurman’, which is cool.”
Thurman herself appeared to be charmed by the fact that the pop-punk heroes decided to name a track after her. She said: “I’m so flattered; it’s so nice. On the nice list! It’s incredibly chivalrous; no one ever asks permission for anything anymore; you don’t even expect it.”
When asked if she would be interested in appearing in the music video for the song, she said: “I don’t know – yeah, sure. If they want the black wig and the dark lipstick [her outfit on the evening she was asked] – I don’t know about the whole look coming through! But we’ll see.”
