Waltz Dishes DiCaprio Injury Details on 'Django'
Audiences would be hard-pressed to not have come out of Quentin Tarantino's shamelessly violent western Django Unchained without some opinion on the inherent brutality present throughout the film. Tarantino's tendency for gratuitous, often cartoonishly excessive violence has always been a point of controversy among viewers, one only marginally eased by the knowledge that such graphic depictions are made up of little more than a convincing combination of red dye and corn syrup.
Understandably, most violence seen on film is staged, most gore, faked. Yet in one particular scene in Django featuring
a rather rabid, hammer wielding Leonardo DiCaprio, an accident during a
take resulted in the actor shedding real blood: an intense moment of
unexpected violence captured on camera and left in the finished film.
ET caught up with Django co-star Christoph Waltz at the BAFTA Awards Season Tea Party in Los Angeles, where he shed light on the incident, revealing, "It was real blood. I don't know why [DiCaprio] did it, or how it happened. …I think it happened because he slammed his hand on the table in the previous takes and the glass moved somehow, and he did it again and the glass was in the way. A little liquor glass with a cut crystal stem."
But DiCaprio wasn't the only performer this year that lost himself in a role. Nominee Hugh Jackman spoke of the extreme measures he had to undertake when preparing for his character in Les Misérables, revealing to ET, "I had to lose about 30 pounds for the beginning of the movie, and by the end of the movie put 30 back on. That was fun."
Hugh Jackman Reveals He Nearly Quit 'Les Mis'
Killer Joe star Juno Temple, who starred opposite an equally intense Matthew McConaughey in the film, explained her process as well, telling ET, "I spent a lot of time talking with [Killer Joe director] William Friedkin about how to go about it. A lot of discussions about playing a woman that comes across one way but is actually a completely different thing. She's incredibly all knowing, and that was really fun to play with the scenes where you could see that and the scenes where you couldn't see that. But I think just getting to work and do scenes with those people, it all came alive."
Christoph Waltz summed up his experience developing his character in Django Unchained this way: "It's a lot of work. … It's wonderful writing that needs to be really thought about. Quentin [Tarantino]'s text is real text; it's not just something to be thrown away. You have to work hard, and that's how you prepare."
For more from the BAFTA Awards Season Tea Party, including a rather "unique" take on the ET theme by Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell, who also shared with us his experience working with actors Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro, click the video above!