Worst to Best: The Performances of Quentin Tarantino

That Quentin Tarantino is more skilled as a writer and director than an actor is beyond dispute. But there's an argument to be made for his on-screen appearances.

What is a great Quentin Tarantino performance? After revisiting From Dusk till Dawn last week for The Next Picture Show podcast, on which we paired it with Ryan Coogler’s (much better) new movie Sinners, I thought about his work in front of the camera and decided it wasn’t the right question. As Roger Ebert puts it in his one-star review of Destiny Turns on the Radio, “Quentin Tarantino isn’t an actor. He’s a director, a good one.” Yet he can be a compelling presence, despite the obvious limitations on his range, which nonetheless didn’t stop him from trying Southwestern, Japanese, and Australian accents at various points in his career. So consider this Worst to Best a ranked list of his most entertaining (or not) performances, and a rationale for why his casting makes sense for his films and sometimes for other directors’, too. 

Unranked: Sid, Sleep with Me (1994); Pick-Up Guy, Desperado (1995)

In the mid-‘90s, riding high off the twin sensations of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was everywhere, resulting in sort of cultural saturation that he seemed to swear off soon after, when he settled into a deliberate pace more suited to a director intent on making only ten features before retirement. His cameo appearances in Sleep with Me and Desperado were an extension of his pop-culture monologue in Reservoir Dogs, along with a party-hopper’s knack for colorful storytelling. His turn in Sleep with Me, a middling high-concept indie comedy, finds him buttonholing Todd Field at a party and explaining why Top Gun is not some dim blockbuster, but the story of a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. (It’s persuasive.) In Desperado, the first of a few collaborations with Robert Rodriguez, he moseys up for a beer and tells the bartender (Cheech Marin) a great joke about a guy who bets $300 he can piss into a small glass 10 feet away without spilling a drop. It either says something about Tarantino or these mediocre movies that he’s the first thing anyone remembers about them. 

9. Johnny Destiny, Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995)

Quote: “Well, Lucille, that’s all the roads you didn’t take. And that’s all the choices you didn’t make. And that’s all the numbers you didn’t bet on. That’s everything that could have happened had things been different.”

As if to christen his own cursed ship, Tarantino took a supporting role in one of the many dreadful indie crime comedies that flooded arthouses in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, popping up in this offbeat whatsit as a supernatural hipster whose surname is unfortunately symbolic. When an escaped convict (Dermot Mulroney) makes his way out to the desert, it’s Johnny Destiny, fate incarnate, who picks him up in a 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner and drives him to Las Vegas, where he reunites with his criminal partner (James Le Gros) for additional trouble. Destiny later levitates out of a motel swimming pool with lightning bolts sparking around him and seems to drive the action, like a hipster deus ex machina. It says something that an attitudinal, dialogue-driven pastiche like Destiny Turns on the Radio has not a single “memorable quote” on the IMDb. 

8. Chester Rush, Four Rooms (1995) 

Quote: “Do you know how long it takes the average American to count to 600? One minute less than it takes to count to 700.”

Still as drunk on Miramax money as his characters in this segment are on Cristal, Tarantino and company were able to patch together Four Rooms, a low-budget anthology project that gave four directors (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino) the opportunity to do the worst work of their careers. As Chester Rush, a white-hot Hollywood filmmaker blowing off steam with his buddies (Bruce Willis, Paul Calderon and Jennifer Beals) on New Year’s Eve, Tarantino presides over his segment like Lars Von Trier in The Kingdom, a master of ceremonies who’s bringing the audience in on an outrageous event. Bringing an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode to life, Chester has agreed to wager his car over a bet that his friend (Calderon) can’t light his Zippo ten times in a row. The whole cacophonous affair ends in a glib, wet fart of a conclusion that brings Four Rooms to a fitting end. 

7. Piringo, Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) 

Quote: “This is sukiyaki, not a damn lollipop.” 

Though Tarantino had greatly dialed back his appearances in other people’s movies after his mid-‘90s peak, he made an exception for Takeshi Miike, a prolific genre enthusiast from across the Pacific who shared his reputation for terrorizing film festivals around the globe. Dressed to look approximately like Clint Eastwood in the “Man with No Name” movies and speaking with an accent that wavers between Southern-ish and Japanese-esque, Tarantino serves as part of a framing device for Miike’s peculiar mash-up of Yojimbo and the Spaghetti Westerns of two Sergios, Leone and Corbucci. Sitting in front of a painted backdrop of a mountain at magic hour, his Piringo opens the film by shooting a snake from a carrion’s mouth, pulling out a whole egg from its disemboweled insides, and later scrambling it up. When Piringo appears later in the film, he violently smacks around a woman for failing to draw the sweetness out of the cabbage in his sukiyaki. Tarantino looks out of place through all of it. He also looks as happy as a kid shipped off to movie fantasy camp. 

6. Desmond, All-American Girl, “Pulp Sitcom” (1995) 

Quote: “You know that FBI warning on the front of videos? That’s not just for show. You get caught moving a hot Yentl, you go to jail.”

In the second-to-last episode of the first and only season of All-American Girl, a sitcom built around stand-up comedian (and his then-girlfriend) Margaret Cho, Tarantino happily participates in a reasonably clever Pulp Fiction parody that re-imagines Jack Rabbit Slim’s as a Fantasy Island-themed ‘80s restaurant (“I’ll have the Warren Burger burger”) and has him stab a meat thermometer into a roasted chicken like it was overdosing Mia Wallace. Tarantino pours on the charm as Desmond, an amiable doofus who sells videocassettes out of a glowing suitcase. (“Speed was really good,” Desmond opines. “It was a little violent for my tastes, though.”) Desmond talks Cho’s character into a date, but things get tense when she discovers he’s a VHS bootlegger selling merchandise for “Average Tony,” a gangster so-named because his appearance is completely mild and nondescript. Overall, it’s a funny little turn for Tarantino, and proof that everyone at least thinks they can do a Christopher Walken impression. 

5. Frankie, Django Unchained (2012) 

Quote: “A little dynamite for you black fellas to play with.” 

Some actors go to extraordinary lengths to master a foreign accent, like Kate Winslet mastering a specific strain of a Philly-speak for Mare of Easttown. That is the opposite of what Tarantino does in Django Unchained. As Frankie, one of three men who take ownership of Django (Jamie Foxx) and three other Black slaves in Django Unchained, Tarantino offers an Australian accent so conspicuously awful that it comes around to being a delight, completely in keeping with a film that’s alight with cartoonish extremes. His oafish cowboy get-up makes him a natural foil for Django, who dances around Frankie and his partners like Bugs Bunny, convincing them to agree to a plan to win $11,000 in bounty money and to give him a fully loaded firearm. Frankie meeting his fate with a bag of dynamite hanging over his gut is one of the film’s funniest payoffs. 

4. McKenas Cole, Alias, “The Box (Part 1)” and “The Box (Part 2)” 

Quote: “There’s this little cajun food place in Abita Springs, Louisiana. It’s called Rockamore’s. You know what they’re famous for? For making people cry. You know what makes them cry? The hot sauce. No one knows how they get that crap so hot. Legend has it that the devil comes by once a month and spits in their frying pan. Point being, the hot sauce at Rockamore’s is like a fluffy vanilla ice-cream cone when compared to what’s in these [needles].” 

Though he appeared in four total episodes of the Jennifer Garner spy series—the second pair, in Season Three, were not as significant—Tarantino made a big splash as an off-the-rack Hans Gruber type in “The Box,” a two-parter in the middle of its inaugural season. Introduced in profile with his prominent chin and sunglasses, Tarantino’s McKenas Cole leads a sophisticated assault on SD-6, the rogue criminal offshoot where Sydney Bristow (Garner) operates as a double agent for the CIA. Cole comes seeking revenge on SD-6 mastermind Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin) for a botched CIA mission Arvin ordered in Chechnya, but he’s also looking for an artifact associated with Milo Rambaldi, the Renaissance-era figure whose gizmos are central to the show. Tarantino makes too much of a meal out of his performance, but he’s at his best when teasing Arvin about implements of torture called “needles of fire.” Sadism makes him feel very much at home. 

3. Richie Gecko, From Dusk till Dawn (1996) 

Quote: “Do they have a waterbed?” 

Based on a previously commissioned script that he dusted off for Rodriguez to direct after Pulp Fiction, From Dusk till Dawn counterintuitively casts Tarantino as the less talkative of two criminal brothers looking to hole up in Mexico after a violent robbery spree. While George Clooney’s Seth Gecko does most of the yapping, Tarantino’s Richie skulks around like a creep, so in thrall to his violent, perverse impulses that Seth leaves the room for take out and returns to find their hostage raped and murdered. Though From Dusk till Dawn indulges a foot fetish that would become a dominant motif in Tarantino’s career—here, Salma Hayek plays a vampire stripper who pours liquor off her toes directly into Richie’s mouth—he commits himself to a character whose sociopathy is a sickness that his brother can’t help but to treat. Could someone else have played Richie better? Sure. But Tarantino doesn’t treat the role as a lark.  

2. Mr. Brown, Reservoir Dogs (1992) 

Quote: “Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick. The entire song. It’s a metaphor for big dicks.” 

Context matters. Taken on its own, Tarantino’s monologue about the true meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is no more or less insightful than his rant about Top Gun in Sleep with Me. But few remember Sleep with Me and posters for Reservoir Dogs have festooned dorm-room walls for three decades running now. As Mr. Brown, one in a group of color-themed crooks brought in on a doomed heist job, Tarantino only gets about five minutes of screen time, but his Madonna speech opens the movie and sets the table for a career in which such diversions into popular culture and other everyday chatter would often commingle with more traditional genre thrills. Tarantino had the audacity and showmanship to introduce himself at the top of Reservoir Dogs and his brief turn threw down the gauntlet. 

1. Jimmie, Pulp Fiction (1994) 

Quote: “Dorks. They look like a couple of dorks.” 

One of the fun aspects of a Tarantino movie is watching genre action collide with ordinary life, like when the muscle-car chase in Death Proof bursts onto a highway full of minivans and economy cars. It happens several times in the Los Angeles of Pulp Fiction—consider the witnesses to Butch running Marcellus over with his car in broad daylight—but the film’s third major segment, “The Bonnie Situation,” makes it central to the conceit. So there’s Tarantino as Jimmy, sipping coffee in his bathroom, as Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) pull their blood-spattered car into his garage and ask for patience while they figure out how to handle the hostage they’ve accidentally shot in the head. Granted, one historical advantage Alfred Hitchcock had in never speaking in his own movies is that he’s not on camera saying the phrase “dead n***er storage” repeatedly, but Tarantino is relaxed and funny as Jimmy, especially once Harvey Keitel’s fixer comes into the scene. His expression when Keitel hoses down the bloodied mobsters is a joy. He’s presiding over legends and having the time of his life.