Tarantino Fired Mélanie Laurent From ‘Inglourious Basterds’ After ‘Terrible’ Table Read and Axed Isabelle Huppert for Not Showing Up: ‘I Don’t Owe You Jack S—‘

Nov 11, 2026 2:56pm PT Tarantino Fired Mélanie Laurent From ‘Inglourious Basterds’ After ‘Terrible’ Table Read and Axed Isabelle Huppert for Not Showing Up: ‘I Don’t Owe You Jack S—‘

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Zack Sharf

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Quentin Tarantino gets brutally honest in Jay Glennie’s new book, “The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,” about his decision to fire Mélanie Laurent and Isabelle Huppert before production started on his 2009 revisionist World War II movie. Laurent ended up being rehired for the leading role of Shosanna Dreyfus, a French cinema owner seeking revenge against the Nazi officer who killed her family.

“Mélanie Laurent’s table read was terrible. It wasn’t good enough to be terrible,” Tarantino told the author (via People). “The most exciting day of preproduction is for me the table read. That is the closest I get to seeing the movie for the first time. Up until then, it’s just been me reading all the scenes to myself or to a friend … so a table read with the whole cast is so exciting and so important to me. Well, Mélanie was terrible, so I fired her.”

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