Quentin Tarantino lied about being in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead for years

Before Quentin Tarantino became one of the biggest writers/directors in Hollywood, he wanted to be an actor (and sometimes we get to see that he still kind of fancies himself one…). But landing a role can be a bit of a catch-22: you may not get hired if you don’t have a resume, while you can’t build a resume until you get roles. So, you lie – and that’s just what Tarantino did, claiming he had a small role in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.

As noted horror aficionado Tarantino said in an early episode of he and Roger Avary’s The Video Archives Podcast, he put Dawn of the Dead on his first resume to pad it out since these were almost impossible to confirm. “There’s a young man in the movie. There’s one of the motorcycle guys. He’s got shaggy hair like I had at the time and he’s got a Tommy gun and he’s in the sidecar of the motorcycle apparatus. And the guy doesn’t really look like me, he looks more like John Johnson…But he looks like he could be me. He has the same kind of brown hair…I was wearing leather all the time and we were more or less the same age…” You can see the character in question in shots plenty long enough to know he was full of it. Below is a clip of his supposed character wreaking havoc in the mall.

Once Tarantino got hired at Video Archives – years after Dawn of the Dead came out – he met a fella named Roger Avary, who it turned out was the biggest George A. Romero fan walking the planet. And so were others hanging around at the time. So he turned it into an acting exercise, attempting to at least convince this group of horror fans that it would be possible it could be him. And while they would analyze it during shifts and probably should have called QT out on his lie, they did entertain it enough for a few years, although Tarantino did finally fess up. As one of the men responded, “I knew that wasn’t you but I’m kinda bummed now. I mean, I knew it wasn’t you but having you say it is like a real f*cking bummer.” Years after that, Tarantino finally did work for Romero, being given a cameo in 2007’s Diary of the Dead – it’s just a voice role, but we can imagine him fully decked out in leather in the recording booth.

Alongside Dawn of the Dead, Tarantino also put Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear from 1987. After he hit it with Reservoir Dogs, the yet-to-be-revised resume made the rounds. It was here that the lies went national, as Leonard Maltin reviewed King Lear on his show and noted, “Oh, and look for a quick cameo by a very young Quentin Tarantino…I might as well have been in the f*cking movie…”

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