Anthony LaPaglia Passed on a Tarantino Role to Shoot Australian TV
Anthony LaPaglia’s new memoir, The Life We Choose, contains a Hollywood what-if with a sharp edge. In 2011 he was invited to meet Quentin Tarantino about playing an Australian slave trader in Django Unchained, and he read with Jamie Foxx for the part. He says he passed on the role to go shoot an independent project for Australian TV.
LaPaglia writes that Tarantino was genuinely astonished at the choice, and quotes him pressing: “Can’t you get out of it?” The anecdote is less a scandal than a character note: the actor who chose the Australian TV shoot over the Tarantino film, and the director who could not quite believe it.
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The fascinating part is not the missed film but the fact that the refusal was real enough to require saying no to Tarantino directly. His “just get out of it” sounds like a director who treats another commitment as an inconvenience to be cancelled.
Or it is the sound of a director who knows how rare the offer is. LaPaglia had already read with Jamie Foxx; the part was not hypothetical.