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The stars of Quentin Tarantino‘s controversial new film, ‘Django Unchained,’ Kerry Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Leonardo DiCaprio, grace the cover of VIBE Magazine’s December/January issue. The trio open up on the challenges they faced making this hot-button story.

VIBE Magazine Editor-In-Chief, Jermaine Hall, interviewed all three actors while on set for their cover shoot at Bathhouse Studios in New York.

Here are some notable quotables from the interview:

Leonardo Dicaprio, whose character played the most wicked of plantation owners Calvin Candie, admitted he had doubts on the depth of the violence, explicit language and racism in the script says – “For me, the initial thing obviously was playing someone so disreputable and horrible whose ideas I obviously couldn’t connect with on any level. I think it took me to places I didn’t even imagine. I remember our first read and it was hard for me to wrap my head around it. My initial response was “Do we need to go this far? Are we going too far?”

Jamie Foxx who plays a slave turned gun-slinging bounty hunter on the warpath as Django explains – “Every two, three years there is a movie about the Holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you’ve seen a move about slavery? What we were doing was an acrobatic routine with the highest degree of difficulty. It’s a tough script to read. I had both my daughters come down to the plantation and I walk them through and said, “This is where your people come from. This is your background.”

Kerry Washington playing Django’s wife, Broomhilda, who was sold off to Calvin Candie (DiCaprio) wants everyone to know – “This is not a doc. This is a Quentin Tarantino film. But I remember there was this one moment in the script where Jamie’s character was put in an awful crazy medieval metal mask. I said, “That’s some sick thing Quentin thought up.” And when I went to the production office to meet about my wardrobe, I saw into the research office. Twenty photos of real masks like that. It made me sad. I realized as much as my degrees and everything I’ve read on slave narratives [should have informed me], I didn’t even know that they wore masks like that, that people did that to us. It took a Tarantino movie for me to know that that’s not some crazy thing out of his imagination. That’s how it went down.”

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