Diane Kruger Was Actually Strangled By Quentin Tarantino in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ for an Authentic Take

Acting can take stars into some perilous situations, but it’s just for show — right? It might be easy to imagine that the magic of editing, the existence of stunt doubles, and other efforts to make sets safe for the cast and crew would prevent most injuries, but that’s unfortunately not the case. 

While some injuries are simply accidents, others are a bit more shocking in nature. That’s true for Diane Kruger’s strangulation scene in Inglourious Basterds. If it looked realistic, that’s because it was actually happening!

‘Inglourious Basterds’ received rave reviews

By the time that Inglourious Basterds hit theaters in 2009, Quentin Tarantino was already known as one of Hollywood’s most successful (if also one of its quirkiest and most intense) directors and writers. The ambitious film is a reimagined historical take on Nazi Germany and the impact of some rogue soldiers determined to mete their revenge on the leaders of the Third Reich, including Hitler himself. 

The stars of the film include Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, and Diane Kruger. The sprawling cast includes Germans displaying unthinkable cruelty toward Jewish characters and a wide range of spies and secret agents working to put a stop to Hitler’s schemes. 

The film was a hit with critics and audiences alike, earning an 89% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and receiving accolades for its suspenseful tale. Many predicted it would go down in cinematic history as a classic rewatched decades later. 

Diane Kruger played Bridget von Hammersmark in ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Diane Kruger initially struggled to land a role in Tarantino’s film. The director had written her off because he’d been unimpressed with another of her films, and he forced the star to jump through several hoops to even get an audition for the character of Bridget von Hammersmark. As she told Geek Tyrant, “It was hard for me to get the job, he had someone else in mind. He didn’t believe I was German. He saw every actress in Germany, everyone.”

Once she landed the role, she called it “a challenge” that she found rewarding: “I’ve never been allowed, in America at least, to ever play such a strong, fierce [character].”

That early tension with Tarantino makes the reports about her character’s strangulation all the more disturbing. As The New York Times reports, Tarantino is often very (literally) hands-on when it comes to the more sadistic moments on the screen. Uma Thurman described such moments in Kill Bill when Tarantino took the reins, “spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it.”

The Washington Post reports that the director also stepped in to do the work himself when Kruger’s character met her on-screen death: “Tarantino claimed that actor Christoph Waltz wouldn’t be up to the task — although he went on to win an Oscar for playing the role of Nazi Hans Landa — and that he would apply either too much or too little pressure.”

Later, Tarantino gleefully recounted the moment and added that he wanted authenticity in the close-up. “[W]hen somebody’s actually being strangled there’s a thing that happens to their face — they turn a certain color and their veins pop out,” Tarantino insisted. 

Diane Kruger’s real-life injury made it to the final cut of the film 

Tarantino’s decision to take matters into his own hands meant that viewers are seeing real strangulation in the final cut of the film. When Kruger’s eyes show fear and the hands cut off her breath, that’s real. She truly did lose access to air during the shot. 

Still, both Kruger and Thurman have spoken out in defense of Tarantino and insist that his intentions were good. In light of the reveal about the strangulation, Kruger said, “He treated me with utter respect and never abused his power or forced me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with.”

Thurman, who famously spoke out against the abuse she faced in Hollywood, also praised Tarantino for “doing the right thing” when she went public about being foced into a dangerous car crash on the set of Kill Bill: “Quentin Tarantino was deeply regretful and remains remorseful about this sorry event, and gave me the footage years later so I could expose it and let it see the light of day, regardless of it most likely being an event for which justice will never be possible.”