Jennifer Jason Leigh gives life to devilish Daisy Domergue in ‘The Hateful Eight’
Jennifer Jason Leigh enjoyed the full Quentin Tarantino experience doing “The Hateful Eight,” where her character cackles through getting splashed with vomited blood, piles on cuts and bruises, and loses teeth after various blows to the face.
Leigh was committed to doing anything and everything to bring Daisy Domergue to glorious, kooky life.
“She’s such a great part,” the actress says. “It appealed to everything I love about acting.”
Leigh, 53, has played drug addicts and prostitutes but acknowledges there’s been nobody as insane or as phenomenal as Daisy, a fugitive shackled to a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell). The two end up stranded with six other dangerous individuals during a blizzard, and by the end of it, she’s brutalized but also does some brutalizing herself.
Awards season voters have taken note. Leigh — who’s also a starring voice in the animated “Anomalisa” already won a National Board of Review Award for supporting actress, garnered nominations for Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes, and is considered a favourite for an Oscar nod.
Tarantino wrote most of the characters specifically for the actors, but with Daisy — whom he saw as “a Manson girl out West, like Susan Atkins or something” — he wanted the character to reveal herself to him. In Leigh, he found an actress who could “make the right decisions for her.”
Co-star Samuel L. Jackson saw Leigh’s commitment “to craft that character from who she is when you first see her in that wagon with Kurt into that feral wild thing,” the actor says.
“She’s as hateful as everybody else in the movie.”