What accent does Quentin Tarantino have in ‘Django Unchained’?
Since emerging in the film industry in the early 1990s, Quentin Tarantino has become one of cinema’s most well-known filmmakers. Whether you love his style or find it tedious, he has asserted himself as a leading figure in Hollywood through years of dedication to his craft.
After he failed to complete his first film, My Best Friend’s Birthday, he eventually made Reservoir Dogs, which debuted in 1992. He shocked many critics with the movie, which was so stylised yet violent and relied so much on conversation between the characters, even if the topics they discussed seemed irrelevant. Tarantino demonstrated early on that he knew how to immerse an audience and craft an authentic world for his story to play out within.
After several more commercial and critical hits, like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, Tarantino began to explore genres he hadn’t yet: westerns, war, and historical dramas.
With Django Unchained, released in 2012, he made his first foray into the western genre, taking audiences to 19th century Texas, where Jamie Foxx’s titular character is emancipated from slavery, trained by a bounty hunter, and does what he can to be reunited with his wife.
What character does Quentin Tarantino play in Django Unchained?
Django encounters some pretty nasty characters, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s vicious Calvin Candie, killing many people who get in the way of his quest for freedom and liberation. In one scene, we see him kill Tarantino’s character, Frankie, who has a minor role as part of the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company.
The filmmaker loves to cameo in his own movies, having starred in six, such as Reservoir Dogs, where he plays a getaway driver; Pulp Fiction, his character being a friend of Jules; and Death Proof, as a bartender. In Django Unchained, he decided to go as far as to kill his character off, giving himself the worst fate of all the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company by letting Frankie be blown up in a giant ball of flames.
Yet, many viewers have ended up coming away from the scene with one question: what accent does Tarantino’s character have? Instead of his usual accent, he can be heard speaking with a strange Australian drawl.
But why an Australian accent?
Tarantino played a member of the mining company who falls for Django’s claims that he is a bounty hunter and will give them a share of reward money, only to shoot them all once they give him a gun. Most viewers were distracted by the fact that Tarantino spoke with a strange take on an Australian accent during the scene, though, which is hardly believable, especially alongside the real Australian actor John Jarratt.
According to some fans, Tarantino could possibly be paying homage to the terrible accent used by James Mason in Mandingo. However, another theory, the one that is most commonly accepted, is that Tarantino simply didn’t know how to do a good enough southern accent, so he chose to do Australian instead. However, at least to Australians, it wasn’t exactly the most convincing accent.
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