In his acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay at the 85th Academy Awards, Quentin Tarantino said that he believes what will make his movies stand the test of time are his characters. There are many memorable elements in Tarantino’s movies – soundtrack choices, quotable dialogue, particularly violent scenes – but the characters are arguably the clearest takeaway from a Tarantino movie.
Over the course of nine feature films (depending on how you count them), Tarantino has introduced moviegoers to all kinds of characters. While most of them exist in a murky moral gray area in the middle, Tarantino’s movies have given viewers some lovable protagonists who are easy to root for and some truly despicable antagonists who are easy to hate.
Lovable: Dr. King Schultz
Christoph Waltz initially refused to play Dr. Schultz when he read Tarantino’s Django Unchained script because he could tell the role of a German dentist had been written into a spaghetti western specifically for him to play. But the director insisted, Waltz relented, and the actor took home another Oscar.
Dr. Schultz initially only frees Django so he can help him locate some bounties, he eventually takes him under his wing and trains him to take up his trade. Waltz made a great comic foil for Jamie Foxx and Dr. Schultz’s politeness hilariously juxtaposed with his professional-grade killing.
Love To Hate: Calvin Candie
According to Quentin Tarantino, Calvin Candie is the only one of his characters that he truly hates. He could see that Col. Landa has been given a job to do and wants to do it well, but couldn’t find any redeeming factors in Leonardo DiCaprio’s slaver character in Django Unchained.
DiCaprio leaned into Calvin’s campiness to make his sinister turns even more shocking. His right-hand man Stephen is also one of Tarantino’s most evil characters.
Lovable: Jackie Brown
Both gun runner Ordell Robbie and the cops think they’re conning the titular flight attendant in Jackie Brown, but she’s actually playing them against each other the whole time. Her greatest asset is that she’s a lot smarter than people expect her to be.
Pam Grier, one of the most revered badasses in movie history, gave a career-best performance as Jackie and shared tangible on-screen chemistry with her co-star Robert Forster.
Love To Hate: Stuntman Mike
Although Death Proof is usually ranked as Tarantino’s worst movie (including by the director himself), Stuntman Mike is a classic slasher villain. He’s a Hollywood stunt driver who uses his “death-proof” car to crash into oncoming traffic and kill unsuspecting young women in gruesome fashion.
Kurt Russell, who’s been one of the most beloved movie stars in the world for decades, played delightfully against type in Death Proof. Mike eventually crosses the wrong women and gets run off the road, dragged out of his car, and beaten to death in the movie’s refreshingly blunt final scene.
Lovable: Rick Dalton
In movies and TV shows, Rick Dalton plays confident, charismatic cowboys and lawmen who stride into dangerous situations and save the day without hesitation. In real life, he’s a complete wreck. He’s riddled with insecurities and even has a meltdown in his trailer after forgetting his lines.
He’s haunted by the career he could’ve had if he did another season of Bounty Law or landed the lead role in The Great Escape. But at the end of the day, he’s “Rick f*ckin’ Dalton, and don’t you forget it.”
Love To Hate: Mr. Blonde
Michael Madsen brings an undeniable charm to the sadistic Mr. Blonde in Tarantino’s debut feature Reservoir Dogs, which only makes his heinous actions even more shocking.
Mr. Blonde’s most memorable moment, of course – and his most evil moment – is when he tortures a cop for fun while dancing to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You.”
Lovable: The Bride
Taking cues from the exploitation genre, Tarantino really puts the Bride through the wringer across the two volumes of Kill Bill, then ultimately rewards her with a daughter and a peaceful life. The audience is as pumped for Beatrix Kiddo to get revenge and find happiness as she is. The worse her circumstances get, like taking a shotgun blast to the chest and being buried alive, the more the audience roots for her.
The character wouldn’t resonate nearly as much if it wasn’t for Uma Thurman’s performance bringing a tangible humanity to the movie’s genre-driven antics.
Love To Hate: Zed
With the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, Tarantino set out to take familiar crime stories like a boxer being bribed by the mob to take a dive and taking wild left turns like the boxer and the mob boss being tied up in a sex dungeon underneath a pawnshop. After capturing Butch and Marsellus, Maynard calls his buddy Zed, who comes down to join Maynard in sexually assaulting his new hostages.
Peter Greene really leaned into Zed’s creepiness, making him one of the slimiest, sleaziest perverts in the Tarantino universe (and there are a lot to choose from). The character gets his comeuppance when Butch returns with a samurai sword to rescue Marsellus, who then outlines a plan to torture Zed with “a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.”
Lovable: Django Freeman
Viewers of Django Unchained root for the titular character on a historical level. Not only does the audience want to see the character of Django reunited with his wife; they want to see the revenge fantasy of a freed slave marching onto a plantation and killing white slavers in an operatic display of bloodshed.
Just as Uma Thurman humanized the Bride in Kill Bill, Jamie Foxx humanized Django in the midst of Tarantino’s extravagant homage-laden spectacle. His transformation into a gunslinger is a pitch-perfect hero’s journey.
Love To Hate: Col. Hans Landa
Before he played the lovable sidekick to Django, Christoph Waltz played one of the most sinister villains in movie history in Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino wrote an incredible role – every scene featuring Landa is a masterclass in suspense-building – and in Waltz, he found the perfect actor to breathe life into that role.
Waltz avoided the over-the-top evilness of the average Nazi performance and instead brought a more subtle menace to Landa. None of the other Best Supporting Actor nominees stood a chance.