The stories about Lawrence Tierney are insane. With his deep, gravelly voice, he got his big break in Hollywood playing gangster John Dillinger in 1945. Forty-one years later, his character Joe Cabot would remark in “Reservoir Dogs” that one of his lackeys was “dead as Dillinger.” Fitting bookends to a career filled with barroom brawls, arrests, and, thanks to Tierney’s love of the bottle, multiple lost opportunities. Tierney went on to play tough guys in films like ”San Quentin,” ”The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” ”Born to Kill” and an Oscars best picture winner “The Greatest Show on Earth.” But his career was marred by his tendency to get in trouble, including a 1973 incident in which he was stabbed in a Manhattan bar. 

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That said, it makes sense that Tarantino, who would go on to revive the careers of actors John Travolta, Pam Grier, and Robert Forster, would cast Tierney as Joe Cabot. Unsurprisingly, the experience was fraught with tension. Of Tierney’s time on set, Tarantino told The Guardian, “Tierney was a complete lunatic… he just needed to be sedated. He was personally challenging to every aspect of film-making… And in the last 20 minutes of the first week we had a blow out and got into a fist fight.” Tarantino fired Tierney, who went home, fired a shotgun at his nephew, and wound up in prison. Tierney, who continued playing small roles throughout the ’90s, passed away in 2002 at the age of 82.