Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: Ranking Every Major Performance

11. Timothy Olyphant As James Stacy

Tarantino has always had a gift for utilizing an actor's real-life history or career and using it in his casting choices to add a meta-weight to the role. And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is certainly full of examples of this, one of the easiest and most blatant ones being that of Olyphant as James Stacy.

Olyphant famously served as the star of the critcally-acclaimed television show Justified for years, in which he played a modern-day cowboy of sorts. So when he shows up in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood playing a real-life actor (James Stacy) playing the protagonist of a real-life cowboy television show (Johnny Madrid Lancer on Lancer), it isn't exactly a stretch to see why he's such a swell fit for the part.

And while Olyphant does an excellent job in the role, sophisticatedly straddling the line between impression and original interpretation, he doesn't get all that much to do. He's essentially there as a piece of scenery for Leo to play off of in a couple of scenes and that's about it, which lands him (fairly or not) at the bottom of this ranking.

Having said all of that, we would still watch a few hours-worth of a Tarantino-helmed, Olyphant-starring version of Lancer in a heartbeat.