Franco Nero may not be in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained after all

Months before Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti Western was revealed as DJANGO UNCHAINED, word went around that Italian actor Franco Nero (DIE HARD 2, CAMELOT, ENTER THE NINJA) was going to appear in a Leone-inspired movie from the filmmaker.

Despite the correlation between QT’s film title and Nero’s legacy, that may have just been a case of mangled translation.

In a recent discussion about the lasting appeal of his character Django, Nero addressed his rumored participation in QT’s upcoming epic about a freed slave and a bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War South: “Now Tarantino is making DJANGO UNCHAINED. Everybody is telling me I am in the movie but I’ve not been asked by Tarantino officially. Not yet. There were many, many other Django films following mine, with other actors and directors, but there is only one Django.”

DJANGO influenced dozens of films and spawned unofficial sequels and spinoffs (including a remake by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, which featured QT himself). The original 1966 movie, directed by Sergio Corbucci, featured Nero as an enigmatic stranger who drags around a coffin containing a belt-fed machinegun. After playing rival gangs against each other, Django unleashes ballistic hell and leaves a trail of bodies behind.

Nero talks about how the vicious outlaw changed his life: “I had no idea it would turn out to be so special. It wasn’t just a success; it was a phenomenon. Everywhere I go people shout Django at me. Even today, as I am working in Brazil, kids call me Django. In Japan, they won’t even put my name on movie posters, they put Django. In Germany, they call all my movies Django; I did a great movie about the Sicilian mafia and they called it Django in the mafia. The Shark Hunter they called Django Django.”

It’s still conceivable that Nero could get a part in DJANGO UNCHAINED — Tarantino does love to hire actors he enjoyed watching in his video store days, and he’s surely seen plenty of Nero’s spaghetti Western work. All we know about the new movie so far is that the filmmaker wants Will Smith to star, and Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson are expected to appear.