If there’s something we will get excited about regarding Quentin Tarantino, it’s anything related to his 10th and final film. If there’s not, it’s anything to do with his acting. Look, we love QT, but the dude is a notoriously bad actor, no matter what he wants you to believe. Really, what does it say when he can give a better performance in a Golden Girls one-off than in his own movie (yes, we’re talking about Django Unchained)? But Tarantino will give acting yet another go, having recently been announced as part of the cast of drama Only What We Carry. But long before that – yet after he played Mr. Brown, Jimmy and the dude that goes on and on about the sexual undertones of Top Gun, he had a significant role on Broadway…which was received about as well as you’d think.
But let’s look at some reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s acting turn in Wait Until Dark in early 1998, taking on the role most famously played by Alan Arkin in the 1967 film but previously played by Robert Duvall on stage. Appearing opposite Marisa Tomei (playing the famed Audrey Hepburn role), Tarantino was widely shredded for his attempt at Broadway acting. As The New York Times put it in their review, “Mr. Tarantino seems menacing to nothing except possibly Mr. Knott’s script. Whether raising his voice in deranged fury or softly promising to commit unspeakable tortures, he registers at best as merely petulant, like a suburban teen-ager who has been denied the use of his father’s Lexus for the night.”
And that’s certainly not all. Variety was a bit more tepid, writing his performance was “unexpectedly straightforward; entering with sunglasses, hair slicked-back, he’s no more or less cheesy than Alan Arkin in the 1967 film.” Going a more vicious route, CurtainUp declared, “Quentin Tarantino can’t scare a deer out of a pair of oncoming headlights.”
And so what was Tarantino’s own reaction to the reception of his acting? According to Biography, QT said he felt was was being noticed as “the one whose acting sucks. I tried not to take it personally, but it was personal. It was not about the play—it was about me, and at a certain point I started getting too thin a skin about the constant criticism.”
So, are we looking forward to Quentin Tarantino’s return to acting? Well, not exactly…But if it’s going to keep him active, then we’ll lend any support we can. It can’t possibly offer anything worse than his Django Unchained accent, right?
