Quentin Tarantino has revealed someone else almost got Brad Pitt’s part in his new film.
Pitt plays Cliff Booth, a stunt double and best friend of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Rick Dalton, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
And while it might be hard, after months of promotion, to imagine another duo on the movie’s posters, Tarantino says Tom Cruise was in talks at one point to possibly play Booth.
“We talked about it,” the director told the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“He’s a great guy. We really hit it off.”
Although Tarantino didn’t end up casting Cruise in his film, he said the two could still end up working together for a future project.
He explained he originally had eight different possible pairings of actors because he couldn’t know for certain that DiCaprio and Pitt would both be willing and available to star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Tarantino did say that the two actors were his top choice and referred to their presence in the film as “the casting coup of the decade”.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which also stars Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, is out on 26 July in the US and 14 August in the UK.
