Vincent Vega  

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Vincent Vega is portrayed by John Travolta in an Academy Award-nominated performance. He, Marsellus Wallace and Mia Wallace are the only characters who appear in all the film's separate stories. Vincent is the brother of Vic Vega, a character in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Vincent is a hitman who has been working for mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) in Amsterdam for over three years and recently returned to Los Angeles, where he has been partnered with Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson). Vincent lives in Redondo Beach and drives a red 1964 Chevrolet Malibu convertible which was in storage while he was in the Netherlands. Mia calls Vincent an Elvis man. He wears a bola tie with his suit, has long hair pulled back into a ponytail, rolls his own cigarettes, uses heroin and orders his steak "bloody as hell". Although Vincent says he does not watch TV he knowledgeably refers to the television show COPS along with movie stars from the 1950s and seems very familiar with Arnold the Pig from the 1960s television series Green Acres. At the time of the story he is seen reading a copy of Modesty Blaise. He expresses scrupulous loyalty towards his boss Marsellus. However, he sometimes strongly resents what he sees as authority and can be a cold, selfish bully. Whenever he goes to the bathroom something bad happens: Mia accidentally overdoses when she finds his heroin and mistakes it for cocaine, the coffee shop gets robbed and in the end Vincent gets killed by Butch.

Background

The role was written for Michael Madsen, who turned it down because he couldn't get out of rehearsals for Wyatt Earp (Madsen had also played Vincent's brother Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs). Mia calls Vincent "cowboy", a reference to Travolta's earlier role in Urban Cowboy. Vincent then calls Mia "cowgirl", a reference to Thurman's film Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Travolta has said some of his dance moves with Uma Thurman during the Jack Rabbit Slim's scene were based on Adam West's Batusi from the 1960s Batman television series. The scene which depicts Vincent plunging a syringe into Mia's chest was filmed with Travolta pulling the needle out; the film was then run backwards. In one of the movie's deleted scenes a reference is made to Vincent Vega's cousin, whose name is Suzanne Vega. Mia asks whether this is the folk singer and Vincent replies that he does not know if his cousin became a folk singer.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Vincent Vega" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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