Up against the ape
Always a fan of scary movies, Jackson soldiers on in confronting King Kong
Only a handful of Hollywood actors have enough of an onscreen presence to match King Kong. Samuel L. Jackson is one of them.
In Kong: Skull Island, Jackson plays Vietnam helicopter squadron leader Preston Packard, the monster’s main nemesis.
Man and beast confront each other when his squadron escorts scientists to Skull Island in search of extraterrestrial creatures.
“I want to represent soldiers in an honest and earnest way,” Jackson says of his portrayal.
“It’s really important to me because of the sacrifices (soldiers) make,” he says. “When Packard says the (Vietnam) war wasn’t lost, it was abandoned, it gave a resonance for that character, and how people would react to him.”
He spent some time researching the role: “I had a wonderful kinship with a couple of military advisers who were actually Vietnam veterans,” Jackson says. “Trying to understand how they lived through that gave me a whole other way of looking at Packard in reference to his men.”
In one pivotal scene, Jackson’s character has to stare down the giant ape. “I think, ‘What would the audience like to see?’ And I thought it would be great to see that face-to-face with Kong,” he says, “with nothing but air and opportunity between them.”
Thanks to movie magic, they shot one Vietnam scene at John Wayne airport in California and another in Hawaii, where Jackson had also shot Jurassic Park.
“We had to stop sometimes when the (Jurassic Park) tour buses would go by.”
He’s always been a fan of monster movies: “I’m a big-things-withteeth-chasing-you fan,” Jackson says. “I loved King Kong, Godzilla and Mothra, or whatever else there was to make you afraid.”
He continues to enjoy entertaining the kid in him: “I’m still doing films I liked as a kid,” he says.
For example, “I’m finally going to do The Blob,” he says, referring to a remake of the 1958 sci-fi horror that stars Steve McQueen.
Does Jackson reprise McQueen’s role?
“No,” he says. “I’m a victim.”