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#275
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Fan Forum Hero
Joined: Apr 2001
Posts: 50,558
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Not sure about that 
Quote:
Copper's Ato Essandoh featured in LA Times' article "Small roles, powerful performances"
Ato Essandoh: D'Artagnan, “Django Unchained”
It may not be every actor’s dream to get ripped apart by dogs. But as D'Artagnan, the runaway slave in “Django Unchained,” actor Ato Essandoh was in heaven. “Quentin Tarantino and Sam Jackson are the reasons I’m an actor,” he declares. Essandoh had graduated from Cornell with a chemical engineering degree when he saw “Pulp Fiction,” starring Jackson. “For the first time, I thought, ‘I wonder what it’s like to be in the movies?’” He’s been finding out ever since.
Essandoh’s D'Artagnan suffers a gruesome fate, yet the atmosphere on the set was so relaxed, Tarantino cracked jokes between takes. “I’m like 'Quentin, I’m about to die here, I need to get into this.’ 'Oh, OK, sorry, sorry, sorry.’ And then he’d make another joke.”
Acting opposite Leonardo DiCaprio (with whom he had previously worked on “Blood Diamond”) helped Essandoh focus. “From the first take, I’ve got the tears going, everything’s going, and I see the look in his eye as he’s delivering the lines, and I’m like, 'Aww, Leo is not playing right now,’” he says of DiCaprio’s evil slave master. “That really helped me a lot.”
Finally meeting Sam Jackson later — and having his hero compliment his work on the BBC America series “Copper” — made the experience complete. “I can die right now,” Essandoh jokes. “I’m good.”
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