10 Movie Characters Who Debuted Much Earlier Than You Think

1. "Jungle" Julia Lucai (Death Proof) - My Best Friend's Birthday & Natural Born Killers

The Character

Popular radio DJ "Jungle" Julia Lucai (Sydney Tamiia Poitier), whose life comes to an untimely end in Quentin Tarantino's exploitation love letter Death Proof by way of the murderous Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell).

Mike drives his death-proof car into the vehicle containing Julia and her friends, killing them instantly in typically gory, Tarantino-esque fashion no less.

Their REAL Debut

Obsessive Tarantino fans insist that this is far from the first time we've seen Julia in a Tarantino project, however.

Tarantino's incomplete 1987 film My Best Friend's Birthday includes references to a character called "Unruly Julie", who happens to be a rival DJ to Tarantino's protagonist Clarence. Putting two and two together, some fans believe Unruly Julie to be Jungle Julia.

If that's too easy for you, there's the further theory that Julia appears in the Tarantino-penned Natural Born Killers as Julie (Terrylene), the assistant to boisterous tabloid journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.).

It certainly requires a little creative imagination on the part of the viewer to thread a through-line for the character across these movies, but given Tarantino's noted love for calling back to his prior works, it also shouldn't be ignored.