Uma Thurman‘s work with Quentin Tarantino made her the it girl of multiple generations.
As Mia Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” she oozed downtown cool that was stifled by the realities of being a rich man’s wife. As The Bride in “Kill Bill,” she radiated menace while barely letting her voice rise above a whisper, selling untold amounts of posters in the process. But the tide rolls endlessly in and out, and it will eventually wash all our GOATs. That’s how the coolest actress of her era ends up reading fiction from the recommendations list of TikTokers pulling Pixar faces.
In a new interview with The Times of London, Uma Thurman goes long on how she chooses her movies, what it’s like to be a mother of adult children and how she got back into sword-fighting for her turn in “The Old Guard 2.” When the topic turns to her bookshelf, Thurman admits she’s become a fan of stories of orcs and elves in love.
“Now non-fiction is just too brutal,” she said of her latest literary obsession. “The world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It’s a great alternative to the newspapers right now.”
When asked for specific titles, Thurman declined out of embarrassment.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It will make me blush.”
Romance stories told against the backdrop of fantasy worlds have almost single-handedly driven a boom in print book sales. 2024 saw the first increase in print book sales in several years, with romantasy books seeing their sales rise by over 35%, per Publishers Weekly. Four of the top 10 fiction titles last year came either from Sarah J. Maas’ “Court of Thorns and Roses” or Rebecca Yarros’ “Empyrean” series, leading lights in the subgenre. If anything, Thurman is not alone in finding herself drawn to the mashup genre that straddles the line between young adult fiction and bodice-rippers.
Thurman might feel a particular kinship with dragon-slayers and knights, as she also trained extensively to learn how to weild a sword for “Kill Bill.” The actress shared that she found that ability right where she left it when it came time to film action scenes for “Old Guard 2.”
“Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn’t have time to do proper training,” she said. “Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword… If your brain has learnt how to memorize sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.”
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