Mary Elizabeth Winstead Tried Not Wearing Shoes to Get Cast in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’
Quentin Tarantino worked alongside Scott Pilgrim star Mary Elizabeth Winstead for the first time in his feature Death Proof. Before she was cast, however, Winstead was determined to work with the filmmaker. So much so that she was advised not to wear shoes to increase her chances.
How Mary Elizabeth Winstead ended up working with Quentin Tarantino on ‘Death Proof’
Winstead was already a fan of Tarantino before their collaboration. So when she first got wind that the filmmaker wanted her for Death Proof, she didn’t need to read the movie’s script. She was already on board to do the feature.
“My agent called and said they were sending over a script and that happens often but it was Quentin Tarantino’s script,” Winstead recalled in an interview with Hollywood. “So it is automatically, ‘Ok, I’ll do it just let me audition any way I possibly can!’ So I got the script. It was such a pleasant thing because it was character after character of interesting female women characters that you don’t normally get in scripts.”
After finally meeting the filmmaker, she and Tarantino bonded over the actor’s work in the film industry.
“I finally got to see him and it was the best audition experience ever. He was so welcoming and gregarious and friendly and aware of all my work, which was probably the weirdest thing. He was like ‘That episode of True Calling you did was awesome! I got the DVD set,’” she recalled.
To increase her chances, Winstead also joked that she exposed her feet to the audition. The filmmaker is rumored to have a fetish due to the amount of feet he’s shot in his movies. Winstead was advised to use this to her advantage if the rumors were true.
“But yeah, I went to the audition in flip-flops. Oh, I knew. Yeah, I knew that. I got the notes and everyone was kind of like, ‘Did you read that, that says he wants you to wear flip-flops?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, he likes feet. I know that. I’m aware,’” she recalled.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s feet weren’t important for ‘Death Proof’
It turned out that Winstead’s feet weren’t given much focus at all in Tarantino’s B-movie homage. But the Fargo actor asserted that it wouldn’t have hurt her chances to try showing them off to begin with. She even took a cue from Sydney Poitier’s daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, who also starred in Death Proof.
“So I got a pedicure, and everything, and I kind of did the same thing that Sydney Poitier says she did, where she just kind of flipped off a shoe — threw off her flip-flops and put her feet on the table. I kind of did that as well, even though my feet, my feet aren’t an important part of the film, where a couple of other girls, they ar. Their feet are showcased, but mine weren’t. But, just in case, I put them out there,” Winstead said.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead changed the way Quentin Tarantino wrote ‘Death Proof’
Tarantino had a specific thought process in mind when it came to casting his Death Proof character Lee Montgomery. Tarantino hadn’t fully formed the character on the page while writing Death Proof, which allowed room for more interpretation.
“So, in the case of the character Lee Montgomery, the actress character, the thing about her was… I actually thought, ‘You know what? I’m not going to write this character so specifically. I’m not going to find the character on the page. I’m going to leave it very open so that I can kind of cast anybody who comes walking in and has a really cool personality. Any neat, interesting, quirky actress that I like or any funny actress that comes in the door, I can take that personality and that will be Lee,’” Tarantino once said in a behind-the-scenes interview about Death Proof.
But when Winstead auditioned for Lee Montgomery, the actor’s performance revealed secrets about the character that he didn’t realize before.
“Then Mary Elizabeth came in. So, we’re talking, and then she does the scene. And as I’m watching the scene, I’m like realizing that she is Lee. She is nailing Lee. It’s not that Mary Elizabeth came in with this wonderful, quirky personality and just sat down and that wonderful, quirky personality took over. No. It’s… she found the character of Lee that was on the page,” he said.
