10 Movies That Dedicated Incredible Sequences To Their Actors

10. Inglorious Basterds - Christoph Waltz

Quentin Tarantino is an absolute master of giving his actors a stage to showcase their very specific talents, and it proved all the more effective in Inglourious Basterds as English-language audiences hadn't yet become acquainted with the brilliant Christoph Waltz.

The movie's nerve-shredding opening sequence, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz) interrogates a French dairy farmer (Denis Ménochet) about the whereabouts of Jewish woman Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) and her family, is effectively built around Waltz's mastery of language.

Despite being a German actor playing a German character, Waltz spends the first 5 minutes of the scene speaking in French, and after exhausting his conversational français, opts to switch to English for the remainder of the agonisingly prolonged sequence.

Ironically, Waltz is actually fluent in French in real life, in addition to obviously speaking German and English.

This scene alone pretty much earned Waltz his much-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and because speaking three languages isn't impressive enough, the actor even speaks some totally convincing Italian later in the movie despite not being fluent in the language.

It's fair to say that Waltz's multi-lingual abilities are put on display throughout the film, but no more impressively than in that stomach-knotting first scene.