Daily Inspiration Quote by Tab Hunter

Tab Hunter’s line lands with the breezy candor of someone who’s lived through Hollywood’s most rigid eras and come out the other side amused. “I’d work for John Waters again” is the polite part; the real charge is in “because he’s so off the wall.” Hunter isn’t just complimenting Waters’ oddball imagination. He’s praising the permission Waters gives: to be playful, to be unguarded, to step outside the polished masculinity Hunter was once hired to embody.

The context matters. Hunter was a matinee-idol product of a studio system that sold innocence and enforced discretion, especially around sexuality. John Waters, by contrast, built a career gleefully celebrating the queer, the trashy, the taboo. When Hunter collaborated with him (most famously in Polyester), it wasn’t merely a casting choice; it was a cultural collision that became a kind of liberation narrative. Hunter’s “again” signals that the first time wasn’t a stunt or a lark - it worked, it felt good, it made sense.

“Off the wall” functions as a strategic euphemism. It’s admiration that sidesteps preaching: Hunter can endorse Waters’ transgression without spelling out what’s being transgressed. The subtext is gratitude for a director who doesn’t demand a sanitized persona, and for an audience willing to watch an old icon get deliciously recontextualized. In one casual sentence, Hunter frames artistic risk as not only survivable, but addictive - once you’ve been unbuttoned, the buttoned-up version starts to look like the real fantasy.