Quentin Tarantino Reveals Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton Has Died

I’ve been to Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema a couple of times, and absolutely love it. So I follow their social media pretty closely, and you can imagine my astonishment to see this post pop up:

That’s right, it’s time to say good-bye to “a wonderful actor”, Rick Dalton. Leonardo DiCaprio’s B-list movie and TV actor from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has “died” at the age of 90 according to Tarantino, revealed by him and The Video Archives Podcast co-host Roger Avary.

I don’t know if Tarantino has ever remained stuck on a character the way he has Rick Dalton. He’s long talked about doing a Bounty Law series, a spinoff take on the fictional show Dalton starred in. Tarantino also has written a Dalton biographical book, similar to the coffee table-style books of the ’70s that singled-out specific actors…

“I wrote The Films of Rick Dalton book,” he said to Jeff Goldsmith. “It’s written as if Rick is real. You know, they have The Films of Charles Bronson and The Films of Anthony Quinn, well, it’s done like that, with synopsis and then some critical quotes from the time, and the book goes through every one of Rick’s movies that he did, leading to the end of his career in 1988, I believe, and every one of his episodic television shows.”

I love the way Tarantino has created a fictional version of the rugged, old-school Hollywood actors he grew up with.  Honestly, there’s so much more that Tarantino could do with Rick Dalton, be it in a movie, TV show, or just in novels, that it’d be a shame if he were to stop. Let’s hope he doesn’t.