Richard E. Grant wants Quentin Tarantino to cast him as a “sleazy Vegas singer”

The actor revealed the roles he wants to play on 'Desert Island Discs'

Richard E. Grant has said he wants to be cast in a Quentin Tarantino film where he plays a “sleazy lounge lizard Vegas singer”.

The actor shared the roles he’d love to play during an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs with host Lauren Laverne.

Speaking on the show, Grant said: “I have a fantasy that Quentin Tarantino is going to cast me as a sort of sleazy lounge lizard Vegas singer, but that has never come to pass, but that is what I would like – and to be in a western!”

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After choosing the track ‘I’m The Greatest Star’ from the Funny Girl soundtrack, the actor also explained that he became a super fan of Barbra Streisand after seeing her on screen in 1969 when he was aged 12.

Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino at the British Academy Film Awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall on 2 February, 2020. CREDIT: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Grant said he was drawn to her “because she had an unusual face – like Donald Sutherland has a very long face – and I’d seen both of them in a movie that same year. Everybody had said [to me]: ‘Hey, you can never be a professional actor and certainly not coming from Swaziland’, as it was called then.”

He added: “So these are the two people that were my kind of lodestars. I thought: ‘Well if they can do it.’ And this [song] is such a cri de cœur of impassioned, wanting to be successful… It’s the backstage rag to riches story of comedian Fanny Brice. I just thought that it encapsulated everything… and nobody else has ever sung it like she has.”

Tarantino has previously said his tenth film will be his last, which will be the follow-up to 2019’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

The director recently released a book titled Cinema Speculation, where he analyses key American films from the 1970s including Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

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