Rick Dalton returns to playing a version of his public image in the Red Apple advert. The piece begins as period advertising and ends by revealing the actor’s bad temper when the take is over.
An advert during the credits
The Red Apple advert appears during the end credits of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Rick Dalton promotes a fictional cigarette brand by drawing on his association with Jake Cahill, the lead in Bounty Law. The piece extends the film’s world through a black-and-white commercial format. After the ending, the viewer encounters another fragment of the actor’s invented career, presented as though it came from a television archive.
The sequence’s placement matters. It does not develop the immediate consequences of the August night, nor does it add a later meeting between the neighbours. It returns to Rick’s professional image and allows the film to end with a scene of performance. The film has already shown interviews, series, films and posters associated with him. The advert expands that repertoire with an activity in which the fictional character becomes a tool for selling a product.
Rick presents himself as an actor known for a particular role. The advertising uses that closeness between person and television identity: the audience can trust the cowboy’s familiarity and transfer it to what he recommends. The advert also links Western tobacco with modern consumption through an invented commercial story. The brand’s continuity is expressed as a small advertising legend, suited to a company that wants to seem old and reliable.
The supposed advantages of the product belong to the discourse of that fictional advert. The film reproduces the confidence with which a celebrity can recite a sales pitch, without offering any real assessment of the tobacco. The tone is especially revealing when the take ends and Rick expresses a very different opinion about what he has just been promoting. The distance between the two moments underpins the scene’s comic turn.
The professional smile and the private irritation
During the take, Rick controls the voice, posture and pace with which he addresses the audience. He has to seem comfortable with the cigarette and convinced by the words he speaks. The performance is shorter than a television episode, but it still demands a recognisable transformation. The actor turns a commercial instruction into a display of confidence, drawing on resources his audience already associates with a Western star.
When the recording is declared finished, that disposition changes. Rick rejects the taste of the cigarette and objects to the photograph used to represent him. The humour depends on how quickly he abandons public cordiality. The piece lets us see work and resistance within the same situation: he has done the advert, even though he does not like the product or the image others have chosen to present it.
His concern about the photograph’s double chin concentrates a kind of vanity that fits the character. The advertising image stays fixed while he can move, correct himself or try to make a different impression. That immobility returns to him a version of himself he considers unflattering. The complaint is small and comic, but it ties into a broader anxiety about who controls the face an actor presents to the public.
The sequence offers another variation on the contrast that runs through Rick Dalton. He can produce a convincing performance and, a few seconds later, show insecurity, anger or sensitivity. The advert does not undermine his professional ability. Precisely because he has managed to sell the appearance of contentment, his later rejection becomes funny. The viewer watches the change in register and recognises the effort the public image had hidden during the take.
A recurring brand within an invented television world
Red Apple appears in several Tarantino films. In this case, the advert gives it a history and a commercial voice within 1969. The familiarity for anyone who recognises the brand adds a wink, but it is not necessary to understand the scene. A viewer encountering it for the first time can follow the advert and enjoy the final rupture without knowing any earlier appearance.
The piece also fits the abundance of adverts, theme tunes and television fragments in the film. The characters inhabit a city where commercial images form part of the environment. Advertising is not just an interruption outside the story; it is also one of Rick’s jobs and one of the ways a star enters other people’s lives. The brand makes it possible to turn that circulation into a specific scene.
The fictional archive format preserves a productive ambiguity. We know that Rick and Bounty Law are inventions, yet the advert adopts conventions that make their existence within the reconstructed past plausible. Its brevity, black and white, and front-facing presentation create an imagined audiovisual memory. The film uses that credibility to expand the character’s professional biography beyond the events we follow over the three main days.
The punchline leaves Rick in a recognisable state of everyday imperfection. After a narrative that has mixed friendship, career and violence, he can still get angry about a bad photograph. The final joke brings the spotlight back to the actor who works, poses and judges himself. The Red Apple advert works because it contains those two presences: the spokesman able to sustain the commercial fiction and the man who, when it is over, wants to argue about the conditions of his own image.
More context in the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood guide.