Artnewspress: True Romance is one of Tarantino’s best movies that he didn’t direct, but he almost came close to playing one of the movie’s most iconic characters.
Quentin Tarantino often makes appearances in his own movies, whether he plays a main character or just has a voiceover, and he almost played an iconic True Romance character. The 1993 movie follows two anti-heroes, Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette), who run away together intending to live happily ever after, only they run into a few setbacks. As Alabama is a former sex worker, Clarence has an almost fatal run-in with her pimp, Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman), and the couple makes one huge drug deal that will sort them out for the rest of their lives, but it ends in a bloodbath.
Though Tarantino is known for both writing and directing ultraviolent movies filled with snappy dialogue about pop culture, which is exactly what True Romance is, he didn’t actually direct the 1993 film. Along with a couple of other early ’90s screenplays, Tarantino sold the True Romance script, and the movie ended up being directed by celebrated action director Tony Scott. However, while he’s nowhere to be seen in the movie, if Tarantino did direct it, he would have given himself a role, just as he did in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and many others. That role turned out to be the most unforgettable character in True Romance.
Tarantino Wrote The Character Of Drexl Spivey For Himself
Gary Oldman absolutely disappeared into the role of Drexl Spivey, but if Quentin Tarantino got his way, he would have played the terrifying pimp himself. The writer didn’t only think he could play Drexl, but he actually wrote the character with himself in mind (via Empire). However, that was under different circumstances. True Romance has a star-studded cast, but at the time of writing the movie, Tarantino didn’t think it was going to be a Hollywood movie with a budget of $13 million directed by Tony Scott. Instead, the writer thought it was going to be a low-budget film.
Tarantino explained, “I thought it would be, like, an $800,000 movie. I thought, ‘No one’s going to let me play Clarence, but I could maybe play Drexl in a cheaper movie.'” It’s quite a different role from Pulp Fiction’s mellow Jimmy and Reservoir Dog’s pop culture-obsessed Mr. Brown, and it might have been hard to take Tarantino seriously in a dreadlock wig and gold teeth. Tarantino’s movie and TV acting roles have always been captivating, and his on-screen presence is always fun, but he isn’t as great of an actor as the Academy Award-winning Gary Oldman.
Oldman Completely Created The Look And Sound Of The Character
Drexl Spivey is one of the most outlandish characters Quentin Tarantino has ever written, as he’s a white pimp who thinks he’s black, but it was Gary Oldman who totally created the iconic look of the character. The actor has discussed how he went to the dentist himself to get the character’s gold teeth, he used the wonky eye prop he used when he played Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it was his idea for the character to have dreadlocks as part of Drexl’s costume in True Romance (via Uproxx). Oldman had transformed himself for movies before, but he is completely unrecognizable as Drexl.
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However, it wasn’t just his look that Oldman spearheaded, but the character’s dialogue too, and in that respect, Tarantino is actually wrongly credited for some of True Romance’s very best lines. According to Uproxx, when Oldman was reading over the script in Brooklyn, he spoke to a group of teenagers and asked how authentic the dialogue was, specifically referring to the word “titties.” The teenagers insisted that the character wouldn’t say that and made the correction. And that’s how the ridiculous “breastesses” was born.
