Tarantino called Dano “weak sauce” and a “weak, weak, uninteresting guy.” Tarantino continued by saying that Austin Butler “would have been wonderful in that role”—technically Butler would have been 16 years old and looked like this at the time, but I digress—but Dano, instead, is “the weakest fucking actor in SAG” (that’s the Screen Actors Guild) and “the limpest dick in the world.” Tarantino further explained: “I am not saying he is giving a terrible performance, I am saying he’s giving a nonentity performance.” In a 2003 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Tarantino defended director Roman Polanski—a U.S. fugitive residing in Europe due to charges accusing him of the 1977 drugging and rape of a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer)—by saying that statutory rape isn’t rape, and that she “wanted to have it.” The interview audio resurfaced in 2018, and Tarantino apologized shortly thereafter, saying, “I incorrectly played devil’s advocate in the debate for the sake of being provocative. Even the official Letterboxd X account posted a Dano tribute, a grid of four stills of the actor with the caption “thinking about him 👑.” Perhaps the biggest whammy: A Quentin Tarantino fan account on X, Quentin Tarantino News, posted in solidarity with the actor, writing, “Sorry Quentin but Paul Dano is one of the most underrated actors of his generation.” As one person rightfully questioned in response, “How wrong do you gotta be for your own stan accounts to be rallying against you?”
Author: Nadira Goffe
Published at: 2025-12-09 22:03:00
Still want to read the full version? Full article
