Quentin Tarantino Returns To Acting In Only What We Carry

Our long nation nightmare is over as Quentin Tarantino returns to his true calling.

People tend to forget that Quentin Tarantino started out as an actor. It’s a bit of QT lore that gets glossed over. The roles he takes in his films aren’t just some Hitchcockian affectation, but prior to stepping behind the camera his acting career pretty much topped out when he played an Elvis impersonator on an episode of The Golden Girls in 1988.

You can absolutely pick him out, can’t you?

But the acting bug never left the Pulp Fiction and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood director, although we should be grateful that cooler heads prevailed when, while making Kill Bill, Gordon Liu took on the role of the very Chinese martial arts master Pai Mei instead of Tarantino, as was originally intended.

Now Deadline brings us the news that Tarantino has quietly wrapped his first on screen acting role since 2012’s Django Unchained (he had a voice cameo in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood). Production has finished on Only What We Carry in Deauville, France, where QT has been part of an ensemble cast that includes Simon Pegg, Sofia Boutella, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Liam Hellman, and Lucy McAlpine, here making her feature debut.

Written and directed by Welsh filmmaker Jamie Adams, Only What We Carry is described as a “meditation on love, loss, and the quiet courage it takes to move forward” which sounds about as far from a Tarantino film as you can get. But other than that, no further story details have been made available.

Still, it’s interesting news. It’s fun to see QT crop up once in a while, but I haven’t seen a single thing in his entire filmography that indicates he’s got the chops for what seems like a pretty heady, trenchant drama. Ah, well – hidden depths and all that.