What was the deal with Zoe Bell’s character in “Django Unchained.” The “Death Proof” actress had a small non-speaking role in Quentin Tarantino’s latest as a bandit whose face was mostly covered by a mask. The way the camera lingers on her during a couple of key scenes suggests that there was originally going to be more to the character, and many wondered whether she’d had scenes cut that we’d be able to look forward to seeing on a future home video release. Sadly, it sounds like that won’t be the case.
Bell was speaking on the “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” red carpet and explained what had happened to her character. “There was a backstory and there was going to be a fight sequence,” she told E!, “but I guess when you’re getting such brilliant shit with Leo and Jamie and Christoph, you just keep shooting and time got kind of crunchy.”
That means that not only did those scenes not make the final cut, they never even made it in front of the camera in the first place. If it weren’t Zoe Bell under that mask, it’s probably likely that Tarantino would have cut the character from the film altogether. It’s a real shame that we didn’t get to see more of that potentially cool side character, but given how bloated the final cut was it would probably have been a tight squeeze to fit that big fight sequence in anyway.
During that fight scene, we’d probably have gotten to see why Bell’s character was wearing that mask later in the movie too. “Part of my face was missing,” said Bell bluntly when asked what the deal was with the mask. That’s a pretty damned good explanation, and a great way to frustrate the film’s fans who would love to see all that stuff but will never get the chance. [via Vulture]
It's clear from the script why the fight sequence got dropped: the gunfight with Django in the house was added during shooting (it's not in the script at all), and if Tarantino had included both scenes he would've had two big action setpieces within about fifteen minutes of each other. Given that a lot of people feel the movie already has one or two climaxes too many, it probably wasn't a bad decision to drop the second fight.