Shannon Lee says Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood made her father look like an "arrogant asshole"

By Sam Barsanti | July 30, 2019 | 8:31pm

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Shannon Lee says Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood made her father look like an "arrogant asshole"

This is the real Bruce Lee Photo: Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection

In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, Mike Moh briefly pops up as Bruce Lee, challenging Brad Pitt’s character to a fight on the set of The Green Hornet. Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, is the longtime stuntman for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, and he and Bruce Lee get into the sort of “no, I’m the coolest” argument that only a pair of old-fashioned Hollywood tough guys could get into, meaning Lee’s appearance is basically just played as a joke—a far cry from the fake ending that someone added to Wikipedia, which involved Lee and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate killing Charles Manson alongside Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton. As it turns out, Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, may have preferred that fake ending.

Speaking with The Wrap, she said her father’s role in the film was “disheartening,” because it made him look like “an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air.” She says she understands Tarantino’s reasoning for that decision, since he needed to set up that Dalton and Booth are “antiheroes” and that the movie is “sort like a rage fantasy of what would happen,” but she says they “didn’t need to treat [Bruce Lee] in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.” She also notes that a lot of people would challenge her father to fights—because obviously any stranger off the street can beat Bruce Lee—but he always tried to avoid real fights, unlike in the movie, where he’s the one who instigates the fight with Brad Pitt.