Jamie Foxx recently joined Vanity Fair for a video interview in which he looked back at a handful of his most iconic acting roles, including the title character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” One of the Oscar winner’s most notable memories of the film is when co-star Leonardo DiCaprio cut short a reading of the script due to Tarantino’s repeated use of the N-word. DiCaprio starred in the film as the sociopathic slave owner Calvin Candie.
“The subject matter. The N-word, specifically. Leo had a hard time saying the N-word,” Foxx said. “We’re doing a read and Leo says, ‘Hey, guys. Cut! I just can’t do this. This is not me.’ Samuel L. Jackson goes, ‘Say that shit, motherfucker! It’s just another Tuesday. Fuck them.’
“I told Leo that in slavery days we would never talk to each other,” Foxx continued. “I’m not your friend. I’m not Jamie Foxx. I’m Django. And I told him, you won’t really be able to play that character until you understand what slavery is about. It was tough. it was a horrific. So the next day I see Leo and I say what’s up to him. He don’t speak to me. He’s ready. Everybody started digging in.”
Jackson once told The New York Times that he and Quentin Tarantino personally told DiCaprio that “you have to” say the N word in “Django Unchained” even if it made him uncomfortable, adding: “Every time someone wants an example of overuse of the N-word, they go to Quentin — it’s unfair. He’s just telling the story and the characters do talk like that. When Steve McQueen does it, it’s art. He’s an artiste. Quentin’s just a popcorn filmmaker.”
Jackson has long defended Tarantino’s use of racial slurs in his screenplays. The actor said in the Tarantino documentary, “QT8: The First Eight,” that there’s “no dishonesty in anything that [Quentin] writes or how people talk, feel, or speak [in his movies].”
“It’s some bullshit,” Jackson once told Esquire magazine about the backlash Tarantino faces. “You can’t just tell a writer he can’t talk, write the words, put the words in the mouths of the people from their ethnicities, the way that they use their words. You cannot do that, because then it becomes an untruth; it’s not honest. It’s just not honest.”
Foxx has always said he never had an issue with Tarantino’s “Django” script, once telling Yahoo Entertainment, “I understood the text. The N-word was said 100 times, but I understood the text — that’s the way it was back in that time.”
