Jamie Foxx was told by Quentin Tarantino he was ‘too cool’ for slave role in Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino told Jamie Foxx he was being “too cool”while filming his slave role in ‘Django Unchained’.

The 57-year-old actor starred in the 2012 action-western as slave-turned-bounty hunter Django, though he was told by the director, 61, that he had to “let all the trappings of [his] real life go” in order to portray the character properly.

During an appearance on ‘The Graham Norton Show’, Foxx said: “I worked with him on ‘Django Unchained’, and he was very strict.  

“I was playing a slave, but he told me I was too cool to be a slave and that I needed to let all the trappings of my real life go. Once I stripped all those things away, the role made sense.”

‘Django Unchained’ is set in 1858 Texas where the slave trade thrives, and follows Foxx in the title role as he isis freed by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and goes on a mission to save his wife Bromhilda von Schaft (Kerry Washington) from a plantation run by the despicable Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his sinister servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).

While ‘Django Unchained’ has several scenes that some could find distressing - including a sequence where one of Calvin’s slaves is mauled to death by a dog as punishment for attempting to escape the plantation - Tarantino previously insisted “what happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse” than what is shown on screen in his movie.

Speaking on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ programme, he said: “If I were to show it a thousand times worse, to me, that wouldn't be exploitative, that would just be how it is. If you can't take it, you can't take it.”

While he is happy with the movie, the filmmaker admitted he was concerned he would be forced to cut one of his favourite scenes from the flick - in which a group of Ku Klux Klan members argue about their masks made out of bags.

During an appearance on the ‘Empire Film Podcast’, Tarantino said: “That has as much hysterical laughter as I’ve ever heard in any screening of any movie, and it happens all over the world.

“That was everyone’s favourite scene in the script. [Sony executive] Amy Pascal, half the reason she wanted to make the movie at Columbia was because of that scene.

“But it was one of those scenes that it was such a hit on the page, I started getting intimidated about would it be that good in the movie? Does everyone love it so much on the page [that it’s] gonna lose something in the translation once I get a bunch of actors playing the roles? Because it’s not based on one performance, it’s a whole lot of people. And it happens at a weird part of the movie.”

‘The Graham Norton Show’ will air on Friday (17.01.24) at 10:40pm on BBC One, and will be available to stream on BBC iPlayer.