Who Narrates Once Upon A Time In Hollywood & Why Was He Invaluable To Quentin Tarantino?
When it comes to show business time capsules, few are as endearing, in-depth, and entertaining as "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." A story that takes place in the twilight of Hollywood's golden years, Quentin Tarantino's most recent film balances humor and dread on the edge of a knife and is also his own personal choice for his best movie.
However, there were a lot of different pieces that had to line up to make "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" come together so effectively. One of them is the narrator, a force that oversees all of the disparate events of the movie and helps to string them together into a cohesive whole.
For this all-important role, Tarantino selected frequent collaborator Kurt Russell and not just because the two had worked together so effectively before. In fact, the real reason that the writer-director chose Russell for the role is for the sake of authenticity. "Kurt is absolutely the youngest guy that I can work with who actually lived that life," Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly. "He did The 'Virginian,' he did 'High Chaparral,' he did these shows. He was doing them when he was a boy."
Kurt Russell appears both off and on-screen in the film
Being that so much of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" centers around Rick Dalton's (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Cliff Booth's (Brad Pitt) run-ins with the kinds of stars, big and small, who would have populated the television and movie landscape in the late 1960s, it's easy to see why Quentin Tarantino would want someone who knows that world inside and out to be the overseer of the story.
"So, he really knows how authentic I am or not in the course of this piece," Tarantino explained. "He's also the son of a Western character actor, so that was his life too. There's almost nobody that Kurt didn't work with at one point or other in his career," the director went on.
Indeed, Russell has over 100 acting credits to his name, and his roles stretch all the way back to 1962. Furthermore, he has had dozens of parts on television, many of which were on shows just like "Lancer," the series that Rick Dalton nabs a guest spot on as a sinister, child-kidnapping villain.
"I find some interesting actor on some show that did something interesting, and I wasn't quite familiar with the guy, and I look him up, and it turns out that, like, him and Kurt had a TV show together!" Tarantino continued. "'This guy?' 'Oh, that guy? Let me tell you about that guy,'" the director added, quoting Russell.