The casting so far for Quentin Tarantino’s seventh feature film, Django Unchained, has been pretty excellent so far, with Jamie Foxx taking the titular role and Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Costner, and Christoph Waltz also cast.
Until now, Samuel L. Jackson (the L. stands for Awesome) has only been rumoured to be a part of the film too, but Collider report he has officially signed on to the project, which is brilliant news.
The film will see Jackson returning to collaborate with Tarantino for the fifth time, after first working with him on Pulp Fiction, which earned Jackson an Oscar nomination, and working with him since on Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, and Inglourious Basterds (as the narrator). Django Unchained focuses on Django (Foxx),
“a slave who’s liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter and taught the tricks of the trade by his mentor. Django’s major goal in life is to recover his wife, and to do it he needs to get past the villainous ranch owner Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), who runs Candyland, a despicable club and plantation in Mississippi where female slaves are exploited as sex objects and males are pitted against each other in “mandingo”-style death matches. Candie is a slave’s worst nightmare, and that is where Django’s wife Broomhilda is an abused slave.”
Jackson and Tarantino are both ridiculously awesome at what they do. They know how to make an utterly fantastic film, the likes of which are essentially incomparable to others in the same field, and their pairing up in the past has led to four exceptional films. So it can only be good news that Jackson’s returning for Django Unchained. In the film, he’ll be playing Stephen,
“a house slave and the right-hand man of a sadistic slavemaster.”
That slavemaster will be played by DiCaprio, who I’m really looking forward to seeing as the villain in this. Filming will be getting underway in November, but Jackson won’t be joining the cast and crew in New Orleans to film his parts until January due to scheduling commitments. It could well be that his role won’t be an especially significant one, but however small or large his part is, seeing Jackson working with Tarantino again is always nothing but fantastic news.
The film is due out in America on Christmas Day next year, and hopefully it will get its UK release then too. The cinemas will probably be closed on the actual day, but would it make me a bad person if I said I want them to be open? Spending Christmas with Tarantino doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all to me.
