Matthew Lillard has now become the first actor actually namechecked in Quentin Tarantino’s recent diatribe against Actors He Doesn’t Like to respond publicly to the unprovoked attacks, telling a crowd at GalaxyCon in Ohio this weekend, “Quentin Tarantino this week said he didn’t like me as an actor. Eh, whatever. Who gives a shit.”
Lillard, who currently stars in this week’s Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, then went on to kind of give a shit, saying, “Listen, the point is that hurts your feelings. It fuckin’ sucks. And you wouldn’t say that to Tom Cruise. You wouldn’t say that to somebody who’s a top-line actor in Hollywood.”
Lillard essentially caught a stray in Tarantino’s takedown during a recent appearance on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, with the bulk of the director’s ire focused on actor Paul Dano and his performance in There Will Be Blood. But the casual, dismissive, Arrested Development-esque “I don’t care for Matthew Lillard” was, in some ways, crueler than Tarantino’s vitriolic assertions that Dano is “the weakest fucking actor in SAG” and “the limpest dick in the world”—especially since, unlike Dano, Lillard didn’t immediately have big-name directors and supporters stepping up to push back against Tarantino’s snap judgments. Which is a shame, given that Lillard has had a long and pretty interesting career—you can read our 2012 Random Roles with him right here to get a sampling of it—where even more commercially minded films (Scream or Scooby-Doo, say) saw him bring full commitment to the job. (To say nothing of his contributions to everything from Twin Peaks to his genuinely strong work in something like 1998’s SLC Punk!) We’re not saying every single performance he’s ever given has been a masterclass, or that he didn’t spend a big chunk of the ’90s and 2000s getting cast in a pretty narrow window of roles. But the man has given a lot of solid performances over the years, and being reached for out of the blue—along with Owen Wilson—as Tarantino suddenly decided to start negatively tossing names around has a unfair flattening effect on a diverse acting resumé.
Lillard himself noted the dichotomy in his appearance at GalaxyCon, saying, “I’m very popular in this room. I’m not very popular in Hollywood. Two totally different microcosms, right? And so, you know, it’s humbling, and it hurts.”
[via Variety]
