The role Julie Dreyfus called a “dream come true”
As far as a Western audience for Julie Dreyfus goes, it’s hard to look beyond her efforts in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in which she played Sofie Fatale across both Volumes 1 & 2. Dreyfus would again star for Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds as Francesca Mondino but has since featured in few productions.
Sofie Fatale is the lawyer, best friend and right-hand woman of Lucy Liu’s assassin character, O-Ren Ishii. Fatale had been at the Massacre at Two Pines when the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad had attempted to take the life of Beatrix Kiddo, AKA The Bride, and when Uma Thurman’s character arrived in Japan to take out O-Ren, Fatale was one of the few to make it out alive, only because of The Bride’s mercy.
In an interview with the BBC, Dreyfus responded to how it felt to have Tarantino write a role specifically for her. The actor admitted that playing for the legendary director was a “dream come true”, noting, “I always secretly hoped that I would get the opportunity to work with him because I was a big fan.”
However, Dreyfus understood that the chances of her ever getting to perform in a Tarantino movie were “very slim, really, considering how few movies he’s made and the amount of time he takes between projects.” When the call finally came in from the director, Dreyfus said she “felt like the luckiest person on the planet.”
Tarantino had contacted Dreyfus when he had first started to write Kill Bill and told her that he had a part for me. The actor didn’t ask why she had been chosen for a role considering her relatively limited filmography, but noting the ingenious quality of Tarantino, she admitted, “He’s got this amazingly fertile world up there in his head, and I guess it just fitted.”
Still, Dreyfus went into the film with some doubts about her role, explaining that she wondered whether his part as Sofie Fatale would make it into the final cut. “I knew he was sincere, but he writes really big scripts, and he always has to hack some of it off at the end,” Dreyfus said. “So I didn’t actually talk about it to anyone until I had the script in my hands.”
As she prepared to take on the role of Fatale, Dreyfus had been worried about “jinxing” Tarantino’s offer, and she plays her cards close to her chest, explaining, “I didn’t want to go round telling everybody, ‘Oh, I’ve got a part in a Tarantino movie’, and then, too bad, the part’s been cut.” Still, Tarantino stuck to his word, and Dreyfus played a key role in Kill Bill‘s overall brilliance.
Dreyfus’ effort in the martial arts action film makes her small filmography all the more perplexing. Since 2009’s performance in Inglourious Basterds, the French actor has only appeared in 2011’s Interpol and 2013’s Bitter Sweet Home Kyoto, so perhaps her arrival in a Tarantino movie really was a dream come true, and she simply couldn’t better it.