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What Makes Calvin Candie One Of The Most Terrifying Villains In Film History
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Mar 31, 2025
For decades, Quentin Tarantino has crafted some of the most ruthless villains in film history. The evil that dwells within these characters can truly be felt by audiences with every line they speak. But it wasn't until Django Unchained that Tarantino created a villain so horrible, that it made him uncomfortable.
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What makes you such a Mandingo expert
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I'm curious what makes you so curious. This is Calvin Candy, and he is one of Tarantino's most reprehensible and terrifying characters
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Calvin Candy is written less like a plantation owner and more like a psychopathic Roman emperor
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who has become drunk with power. And it's DiCaprio's incredibly nuanced performance that distills all of this grandiosity, murder
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and hatred into a character that feels very real in very horrible ways
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Go on, we'll finish it. A good actor must live, undeniably, in the truth of the moment despite the imaginary
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circumstances surrounding them. And sometimes those imaginary circumstances can be so unfathomably cruel and awful that
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it can be hard to watch. Django Unchained is the seventh film in the Tarantino canon of work
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The film is centered around the titular protagonist, Django, played by Jamie Foxx
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who is a slave freed by a dentist-turned-bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz, played by Christoph Waltz
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The two embark on a journey and deceive a wealthy and brutal southern slave owner named Calvin Candy
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in an effort to free Django's wife, Broomhilda, played by Kerry Washington
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from a life of servitude at Calvin Candy's estate. Hey, little troublemaker
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You silver-tongued devil, you. It's heavily inspired by the spaghetti western genre
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and is loosely based on the 1966 film Django. Directed by Sergio Corbucci
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Quentin Tarantino is known for delivering stylized genre films that don't pull any punches when it comes to blending nuanced
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and intriguing dialogue with gritty violence in a way that feels filled with style, symbolism, and meaning
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This is all part of what makes a Tarantino film great, but none of that would be possible
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without hiring the absolute best talent available. Calvin Candy is the first character
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that Tarantino has ever gone on record to say that he actually hates
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In an interview with Playboy magazine, Tarantino stated, I hate Candy, and I normally like my villains
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no matter how bad they are. Tarantino's catalog of completely reprehensible characters
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is quite long. Zed from Pulp Fiction, Bill from Kill Bill, and of course Hans Landa
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are all about as horrible as a person could possibly imagine. For Tarantino to say that this is the character that made him uncomfortable is actually quite a statement From the outset Calvin Candy is conveyed to us as a disgusting and brutal maniac The first scene in which Calvin Candy is introduced
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gives us everything we need to know about this character. Megalomania is reaching out of the screen
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and punching us in the face as Dr. King Schultz and Django aren't even given a moment to speak
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before Calvin Candy demands them to address him. Why do you want to get in the Mandingo business
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You don't intend to allow your second to make the proper introductions
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It is very clear to us that this room, with its blood-stained floors, billiard table
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wet bar, and comfortable seating, is Calvin Candy's throne room. And it is a testament to his inhumane brutality and complete sociopathy
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The setting here is quite disturbing, mostly because of how sparsely attended
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and intimate this fight actually is. It's just Calvin Candy and one other guy watching two slaves fight to the death while they sip on tea cocktails five feet away
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You can almost smell this room. We're processing so much disgust during this scene, it's almost hard to track the narrative
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There are some quick cutaways to the reactions of Calvin Candy's slaves during the sequence
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which serve as an extremely efficient reminder that anyone in this room who isn't white is filled with anxiety and fear
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Candy's response to these grotesque events playing out is that of a person riding a roller coaster
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Outside of Candy displaying all of this violent hedonism over the bloodshed
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we begin to understand that this is an egotistical flex over Dr. King, Schultz, and Django
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Showing them what he is capable of instills fear in them before beginning the sales negotiation for which they have come
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The choices that DiCaprio makes here as a performer are very small and incredibly powerful
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The dialogue is minimal and the eye contact is everything as Candy sizes up Django and King
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Schultz's tolerance for cruelty. The cherry on top is that DiCaprio is able to sprinkle in some
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amusement behind these monstrous antics in a way that amplifies the horror of this scene three times
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over. Candy enjoys these displays of savagery and he enjoys observing the effects that they have on
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others. And it's not necessarily the acts themselves that terrify us, but the established normalcy of
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them. Throughout the rest of the film, we delve deeper and deeper into Calvin Candy's depravity
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En route to Candyland Calvin orders his henchmen to allow their dogs to eat a slave alive for underperforming in a fight The first time we see Broomhilda she is being hauled out of a sweat box for attempting to escape He later orders Broomhilda to remove her clothes at the dinner table to show his guests the
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scars from a beating he administered to her for trying to run away, referring to them as
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All of this reprehensible, tortuous megalomania culminates in this climactic scene in which
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Calvin Candy discovers Django and King Schultz's ruse through the help of his head of house slave
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Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Prior to this scene, Stephen was seen as little more than
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a bumbling sycophant. But in this room, we see that Stephen is more intelligent than Calvin
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himself. When Stephen finally convinces Calvin of the current ruse occurring under his roof, we see Calvin's blood boil. Based on our earlier understanding of this character
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he is a man who commanded his dog to eat a human being alive over a matter of just a few hundred
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dollars. So who knows what he is going to be able to do to people actively defrauding him over
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thousands of dollars in his own home. When Calvin re-enters, we are expecting him to exhibit
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outward rage. But what we get is almost the exact opposite. Calvin enters with a frightening amount
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of confidence due to his new understanding of the situation at hand. It's a subtle shift
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DiCaprio is able to show us that this character is barely containing his anger as he reaches into
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his apothecary bag and places a human skull on the table. We have no idea what is about to
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transpire, but we know it's not going to be very good. After weaving the tale of the slave to whom
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this skull belonged, Candy begins the less than hospitable act of aggressively sawing into the
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skull of a former slave. This is all done in an attempt to psychologically justify white supremacy
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He breaks into the back of this skull to prove his point scientifically. The area associated
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with submissiveness is larger than any human or any other subhuman species on planet Earth
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This deranged, misguided, and insane viewpoint is all derived from a man who owns slaves
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who he abuses, and murders with reckless abandon. This tonal shift indicates to our
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protagonists that clearly the jig is up. When Candy threatens to break Django skull open Django and Schultz leap from their seats in terror only to be met with the barrel end of a shotgun Candy then explodes smashing his hand down on a glass
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in an explosion of rage. This glass was not a prop, by the way. Leonardo DiCaprio unintentionally
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smashed his hand into this glass, puncturing his palm on the stem on the way down, so all of the
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blood coming out of his hand at this point is 100% real. This take actually broke Jamie Foxx out
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of character, and Tarantino's initial response to the moment was that Leonardo DiCaprio planned
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the stunt out and used a fake blood rig. This is largely because DiCaprio didn't miss a single beat
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and incorporated the injury into the scene. This is where DiCaprio's intelligence as a performer
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truly shines. Instead of yelling to cut and calling for a set medic, Leonardo DiCaprio
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embraces the performance philosophy of there are no mistakes, only new opportunities, and uses his
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injury to further fuel his character. It's incredibly effective. Naturally, when the camera
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cut, DiCaprio received necessary medical attention before they resumed filming the remainder of the
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scene. So he didn't actually smear his own blood all over Kerry Washington's face, but
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this incident speaks to the level of emotional depth DiCaprio brings to his performances
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The emotions he is portraying are true and real. They are only delivered through imaginary
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circumstances. The scene at Candyland has now transitioned from something tense and dangerous
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to something straight out of American Psycho. The word unhinged just doesn't quite begin to cover
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what is being conveyed through DiCaprio's performance. Humanity has left his eyes as Candy explains
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that he is ready and willing to bludgeon Broomhilda to death with his hammer
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and will do so with great pleasure if they do not accept his new offer of $12,000
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for Broomhilda and Broomhilda alone. Once Candy gets paid, he brings the hammer down away from her
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and closes the deal. Then, somehow DiCaprio is able to seamlessly morph back into his charming Southern persona
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If you care to join me in the parlor, we will be serving white cake
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DiCaprio delivers a performance so strong a viewer can actually have a physical reaction to how much they hate him in the hands of a lesser performer
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Calvin Candy may not have worked at all. Emotional intelligence is everything when it comes to delivering a performance
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and DiCaprio has an innate ability to navigate uncharted territory in the human psyche
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in order to deliver the frightening realism necessary to bring this character to life
#Candy & Sweets