The Hidden Cameos You Probably Missed in Django Unchained's Unmasking Scene

I saw Django Unchained on the opening weekend it came out, on a Sunday morning at The Grove. It was a bloody, kinetic triumph. A revenge movie about America from the point of view of a director trying to deconstruct the myths we tell each other through film and TV.

One of the scenes that's small but I think is worth talking about is full of cameos. It's the hoods-off, or unmasking, scene where some KKK members on horses pull the pillowcases off to talk about ambushing Django and the good doctor.

Big Daddy (Don Johnson) leads the group of white supremacists on a midnight raid, but the assault grinds to a halt not because of strategic complications, but because nobody can see through their hand-sewn, poorly cut eyeholes.

Now, the audience is laughing at the scene, but when the masks come off, the laughter grows as we see the celebs.

Let's dive in.

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Unmasking the Cameos

Okay, so this scene is not some subtextual callout of Hollywood unmasking or any conspiracy theory. It's just played for laughs. It's Tarantino having fun with people, and I think seeing him have fun in this Western is a real gift.

Here are the famous people he got to come to set to be goofy that day.

• Jonah Hill as Randy (Bag Head #2): Hill was apparently slated for a much larger role in the film, which he had to turn down due to scheduling conflicts with The Wolf of Wall Street. But how can you pass up being in a Tarantino movie, too? Tarantino wrote the hilarious monologue specifically for him so he got to be in it anyway.
• Quentin Tarantino as Robert (Bag Head #1): Many viewers know Tarantino appears late in the film as a LeQuint Dickey Mining Company employee who gets blown up by dynamite. But he's ALSO in this scene. If you listen closely to the voice of the man trying to logically mediate the mask argument ("I think we all think the bags was a nice idea..."), that is Tarantino muffled under a sack.
• Don Johnson as Big Daddy: Okay, not really a cameo since he's in a lot of the movie. But I loved seeing him remind us that he is an immense star.
• Michael Parks: The legendary character actor, who is great in everything, is a favorite of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. And also Kevin Smith. He appears unmasked briefly, but you can hear him in the dark, too.

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The Scene That Almost Didn't Exist

Despite being widely considered one of the funniest sequences Tarantino ever wrote, the director almost cut it entirely. He told the Empire Film Podcast:

“That has as much hysterical laughter as I’ve ever heard in any screening of any movie, and it happens all over the world. That was everyone’s favorite scene in the script. Amy Pascal, half the reason she wanted to make the movie at Columbia was because of that scene. But it was one of those scenes that it was such a hit on the page, I started getting intimidated about would it be that good in the movie? Does everyone love it so much on the page [that it’s] gonna lose something in the translation once I get a bunch of actors playing the roles? Because it’s not based on one performance, it’s a whole lot of people. And it happens at a weird part of the movie.”

While Tarantino and his editor Fred Raskin were pleased with their assembly, early private viewings did not hit, and it freaked them out.

“So we shoot the scene, and forget about the fact that it’s a long comedy sequence – it’s a five-minute non-sequitur in a movie that’s already really long. So me and my editor Fred [Raskin] we cut the movie together, we cut that sequence together, and we’re really happy with it… and so an interviewer would come and interview me and I would leave the editing room and have lunch with them and talk about something, and I’d go, ‘Hey do you wanna see a scene from the movie?’ ‘Yeah sure, I’d be happy to!’ Or a director or somebody would visit. And so we had like four different times where somebody came by to visit for whatever reason and we were gonna show them something, so we would bring out that scene and show it to them. And it never got the response we thought it should get. They didn’t really know what the hell they were watching. It’s almost like in The Prestige when Christian Bale does the magic trick [Hugh Jackman is] like, ‘He doesn’t even do it right! The audience doesn’t even realize what a good trick it is!’ (laughs)”

Tarantino took a tactical risk and pulled the sequence entirely before screening the rough cut for executives. He didn't want silence.

“So we had had nothing but dispiriting responses when it came to that sequence. So when it came time to actually show The Weinstein Company and Sony the movie for the first time on an AVID, we decided to take that scene out. And so we showed it to them without that scene, and then afterwards Amy Pascal was like, ‘What the fuck happened to the baghead scene?’ and I said, ‘Here’s the deal. I wanted you to see the movie without it so you would know that we don’t need it. Now, let’s put it back in for the first market research screening. Let’s see what the audience response is and from that point we’ll figure out what to do, once we hear the audience response.’ Because I wasn’t that confident that it was going to get the greatest response. Because I just saw it one person at a time.”

They put the scene back in and rolled the dice. His gamble paid off the moment they finally tested the movie:

“Then we have the first market research screening, and the entire theater just breaks into laughter for five minutes straight. It brings the entire house down, and right when they needed to be brought down – it’s a heavy section. And so it was like, ‘Okay well I guess this scene is going in the movie.’”

Summing It All Up

This scene turns the KKK into a bunch of idiots and a laughing stock, and lampoons just how stupid racism is, while also letting a bunch of actors ham it up on screen.

It's an iconic moment that we're glad he left in the movie.

Let me know what you think in the comments.