‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ character Rick Dalton has died according to Quentin Tarantino

Let’s call this a fauxbituary. On Friday, The Video Archives Podcast – the show director Quentin Tarantino hosts with his longtime friend and “Pulp Fiction” co-writer and Oscar winner Roger Avary – announced that Rick Dalton, the “Bounty Law” star who helped thwart the attempted murder of actress Sharon Tate, had died at the age of 90.

“I was never actually that big of a fan of Rick Dalton, but seeing how upset Quentin is today and how inconsolable he is has me wanting to see ‘The Fireman 2’ again. My favorite Dalton film,” Avary, keeping up the bit, wrote on Twitter.

At the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, the movie theater Tarantino has owned since 2007, Dalton received a tribute on the marquee.

Dalton, of course, was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Tarantino’s alternate-history epic that imagines what might have happened if a struggling television actor (DiCaprio) and his stuntman buddy, Cliff (played by Brad Pitt), had been around to stop the Manson Family murders. The role is considered one of DiCaprio’s greatest. 

“We looked at a lot of different actors as a template for who Rick might be, from Edd Burns to Ty Hardin, and then I sort of…in watching all of this television and all of these B films, like ‘The Guns of the Magnificent Seven.’ I’d watched a lot of different Westerns, but I started to delve into television because I was like OK, this is what happens to Rick afterward. I wanted to know about what Rick is doing now, and the fact that he belongs to this generation of actors that didn’t really study the craft,” DiCaprio said of the character in 2019. “This guy came from the Midwest, hung out in Hollywood and tried to get a foot in the door, but didn’t try to necessarily elevate. And he’s pissed off at the industry that they don’t recognize his talent and his potential. That’s what this little girl sort of represents, and I thought it was his great celebration of our culture in Los Angeles, and cinema, and those people that never quite made that transition. I was really touched by the beauty of his relationship with this young, who is like, aren’t we lucky? Yeah, you didn’t make the Steve McQueen transition from television to movies, but nonetheless, aren’t we lucky to be working in this town? I really queued into that, and then of course the great relationship between Rick and Cliff.”

According to The Video Archives Twitter account, the next episode of the podcast will be devoted to Dalton’s career.

Tarantino has talked previously about Dalton’s career – or at least the career the filmmaker wrote for him. “I wrote ‘The Films of Rick Dalton book,’” he said on a podcast in 2021. “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.”

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