Not kidding around
Julia Butters, Roman Griffin Davis and Noah Jupe, wise beyond their years, deliver riveting performances.
“Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood”
Sitting at a table near the snack bar at the Alamo Drafthouse for an interview, Julia Butters waits patiently, but not for any chaperone help. As the 10-year-old Butters, who’s been a working actress since the age of 4, explains, “[My mother] doesn’t sit in.”
It’s this same air of self-possession she brings to her performance in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood”: As Trudi Fraser, a child actor on a TV western, Butters commands her brief time onscreen, much of it buoying her dejected, has-been costar Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio).
“I’m not super Method — I don’t have people call me by my character’s name,” as Trudi does, Butters says on a break from her ABC sitcom “American Housewife.” “But Trudi taught me to be more focused.”
And DiCaprio helped her shape a scene. “He invited me over to his house to run lines. Sometimes he’d give me direction,” she says. “For example, [the scene] when I’m comforting him when he’s crying? Before I was like, [glibly] ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ And Leo said, ‘I feel like you should treat me like a baby.’ So then it was like, [low, soothing voice] ‘It’s OK, it’s OK .’”
For the TV western shooting within the movie, Dalton’s character holds Trudi at gunpoint on his lap. In squaring off with his enemy, he hurls her to the floor of a saloon. Another idea he had presented to Butters in their preparation.
“He said, ‘I feel like my motivation in this scene would be to just chuck the little girl.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh, yeah!’ I love doing stunts. Zoe Bell, the stunt coordinator, really took care of me. She had hip pads, knee pads, even
wrist pads and after we’d cut she’d come over with ice packs for my hands so they wouldn’t ache in the morning from taking a fall.”
Butters even gave her character a back story. She decided that a few years earlier Trudi had been fired for messing around on the set of a TV sitcom. From then on she vowed to be professional and focused. “She used to be a super normal, playful girl; then she turned into this low-profile, very professional girl,” Butters says.
Tarantino, she says, discovered her when he was writing the script.
“He likes to have the TV on when he’s writing and he looked up and saw [me]. I was in a school restroom telling a story to all these kids. And he thought, ‘Wow, I should audition her.’ Recently, I came into that restroom on the [‘American Housewife’] set, the same one where [that scene was shot]. I sat there just looking around thinking, ‘This is where my life changed.’ ”