Why the gimp has no tongue in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’
Quentin Tarantino has made plenty of great movies, but none of them has proven to be as iconic as Pulp Fiction. The classic crime thriller throws up unforgettable moments in what feels like every few minutes.
Whether it’s the memorable exchanges at the diner that bookend the film, Christopher Walken’s scene-stealing cameo to deliver the gold watch anecdote as only he can, or the wordplay that defines the dynamic between hitmen Jules and Vincent, Pulp Fiction revels in virtually every single one of its scenes being instantly-recognisable and endlessly quotable. The dancing at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Mia Wallace being resuscitated by a needle to the heart, or Marvin getting shot in the face; it’s all pure cinematic magic.
When it comes to the most unnerving, though, it’s impossible to look beyond the Gimp. Having been captured by Zed and Maynard, Bruce Willis’ Butch and Ving Rhames’ Marsellus Wallace need to put their differences to one side in order to formulate an escape from circumstances that could generously be described as less than ideal.
Stephen Hibbert was handed the distinction of being squeezed into leather bondage gear and paraded out in front of Zed’s victims to add another unseemly layer to the proceedings. It was made all the more horrifying by his entire verbiage being restricted to nothing more than guttural screams and moans.
If that wasn’t unsettling enough, Hibbert revealed to Vulture that he came up with his own backstory and motivations to enhance his restrictive contributions to Pulp Fiction. A commendable effort to get into the right mindset of the character, but the revelation that the Gimp canonically doesn’t have a tongue was information definitely better off left unsaid.
“When it says in the script, ‘The Gimp screams to alert them,’ when Bruce Willis breaks out of his ropes, it just says that he screams. It doesn’t say, ‘He screams their names’. There’s no dialogue,” Hibbert shared before offering Tarantino his own suggestions for how to play it.
“So one of the ideas that I toyed with, that I said to Quentin was, ‘It would be kind of cool if they cut this guy’s tongue out, so he really can’t speak,'” he continued. “So I kind of played that as why he doesn’t speak, and that informed the noises I make.”
According to the actor, he “made noises with my tongue flat against the bottom of my mouth, so there was a sense of there being no tongue movement to help formulate words or sounds”. While it wasn’t quite going full method, Hibbert still took his performance to the next level, much to the delight of Pulp Fiction‘s writer and director.
“I decided to do a weird dance and act all creepy towards Bruce Willis,” he said. “And Quentin liked those things.” It was a thrill for Tarantino, but Hibbert conspired to chill multiple generations of viewers to the bone despite his face never being shown on-screen.
