CELEBRITIES
Veteran actor Samuel L Jackson never tires of the challenge of taking on so many different characters.
Samuel L Jackson, a character actor who has amply demonstrated that, when asked to do so, he can more than carry his own weight as a leading man, has created a gallery of outre characters few other actors can rival. He’s played flamboyant radio host Mister Senor Love Daddy, drug addict Gator Purify and bible-spouting hitman Jules Winnfield. He’s played the opportunistic Rev Fred Sultan, jedi knight Mace Windu and iconic private eye John Shaft. He’s played comic-book obsessive Elijah Price, inspirational basketball coach Ken Carter and Marvel Comics superspy Nick Fury. He’s played boxers, musicians, criminals, artists, teachers and more, each a new creation and, usually, each with a new hairstyle to match.
Is he ever intimidated by the challenge of adding someone new to that roster of memorable figures?
“No, I’m always anxious to jump in there and figure out who a character is, where they’re coming from and what they’re doing,” the 68-year-old actor said. “Exploring the human condition is part of the challenge.
“When I look at scripts, my main criteria is, ‘Have I seen this man before?’,” Jackson explained. “Then I think, ‘Have I talked to anybody like this?’ That’s how I know how I’ll approach it. I know I can approach it. I want to make it feel real … I look at characters and say, ‘What is their process? How do they look at life?’
“In the end,” he concluded, “it’s all makebelieve. You make up anything you can to make the character fuller for yourself as an actor.”
Jackson has been one of Hollywood’s busiest actors for many years, and 2017 is no exception. He narrates the new documentary I Am Not Your Negro, opening in February, which tells the story of race in modern America via writer James Baldwin and his unfinished novel.
This spring he will be seen as a military officer in Kong: Skull Island and will team up with Ryan Reynolds and Salma Hayek in The Hitman’s Bodyguard.
Further down the line, he will reprise two previous roles, playing secret agent Nick Fury in Avengers: Infinity War and voicing Frozone in The Incredibles 2, both due in 2018.
Ahead of all of that, though, is XXX: Return of Xander Cage, which opened on Jan 20. Vin Diesel is back as action hero Xander Cage, who was introduced in XXX (2002) and said to have been killed in XXX: State of the Union (2005). Of course he’s not really dead, and National Security Agency agent Augustus Gibbons (Jackson) calls him back into action for a new mission.
His heart may be in serious drama, but — as his filmography suggests — Jackson has no problem with big popcorn films or huge action set-pieces.
“I love doing serious movies, but I’m not always that serious guy,” he said. “I also want to make the kind of movies I liked as a kid. This is part of a franchise that people enjoy, and I’m always excited to do more.
“I love the idea of people sitting in a dark movie theatre to just get away from it all. There need to be movies that are just about having some fun.”
On the heavier front, Jackson has long been a favourite of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, and two of his most substantial roles in recent years came in Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015). They were his fifth and sixth movies with Tarantino.
“Quentin and I are generally on the same wavelength,” Jackson said. “He writes movies he wants to see. We watch a lot of the same stuff. He writes roles for me that I want to see myself doing.
“When I get his scripts, which are written beautifully, they are exactly what they need to be. I’m also able to say to him, ‘Can you add something here, so I can clarify?’”
In The Hateful Eight, Jackson said, “I was able to play an interesting and colourful, and kind of smart and very dangerous, guy. Kind of hard to find that combination. It also gave me the opportunity to do real nasty [stuff ].”
Born in Washington, DC, Jackson grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his mother was a factory worker. Because Jackson stuttered as a child, a speech therapist suggested that he audition for a play. It cured his stutter and changed his life.
He started to dream of becoming an actor, dreams fuelled by Saturdays spent at the movies, where swashbuckler Errol Flynn was a particular hero of his.
“I’d sit there imagining that someday that could be me up there,” Jackson recalled. “Either that or I’d become an oceanographer. I wanted to be the black Jacques Cousteau.”
After graduating from Morehouse College with a degree in drama, Jackson spent a few years doing theatre in Atlanta, where he met his wife, actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson. In 1976 they moved to New York to audition for theatre roles.
“I’ve only had one real job outside of the theatre,” Jackson recalled, “as a security guard outside of Manhattan Plaza. It was a construction site. The people hadn’t moved in yet. I punched a clock from 11 at night to 7 in the morning. I observed everything going on in the night. It was great acting training.”
He started to get stage work, but his dream was still to make movies. “I’d call my agent and ask her, ‘Did Hollywood call today?’ It was almost like a recording,” Jackson recalled. “She would say, ‘No, Sam, not today.’ One day I called her and asked if Hollywood called, and she said, ‘Actually, they did.’”
It was Spike Lee who had called. He cast Jackson as Mister Senor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing (1989), and later in Mo’ Better Blues (1990) and in his breakthrough role as the drug-addicted brother of a prosperous architect (Wesley Snipes) in Jungle Fever (1991).
Jackson was off and running, making everything from Jurassic Park (1993) and A Time to Kill (1996) to Snakes on a Plane (2006) and Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014). He was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).
He first played Nick Fury in Iron Man (2008), and Avengers: Infinity War will be his eighth outing in the role, not counting some video games and two episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2014). Jackson sounded eager for more.
“Nick seems to grow with each film,” he said. “It’s much more than a comic-book feature. You actually have to think about something when you see these films. and that always excites me.”
With each of the Marvel films, Jackson said, he’s transported back to his childhood.
“As a kid I’d sit around and read comic books,” he said. “You wonder if there is a world like that. You grow up as an actor and want to be inside that childhood fantasy. You step on the set and say to yourself … ‘Yeah’.”
He’s been in a great many hits, which Jackson attributes at least in part to the fact that his tastes and those of the public line up. He makes movies that he would pay to see, and people pay to see them.
“I think I represent a lot of moviegoers who want to be entertained,” he said. “When you get it right, it’s exciting. I want people to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers and walk out of my films feeling like they got their money’s worth.”
Jackson and his wife, who married in 1980, live in Beverly Hills, where they focus on their careers — she’s been seen lately as Lt Dee Ann Carver on Blue Bloods (2014-15), Norma O’Neal on Show Me a Hero (2015) and Mama Mabel on Luke Cage (2016) — and keep tabs on that of their grown daughter, television producer Zoe Jackson.
“People say ‘I love your work’, and that’s important to me,” the actor said. “I love the part where they add ‘your work’, because it’s nice when someone says ‘I love you’, but really nice when someone says to me that a particular character moved them.
“It’s a good life — especially if you add a little golf to the mix.”
As for negative feedback, he doesn’t hear much of that and doesn’t agree with the criticism he hears most often.
“Some people say I do too many movies,” Jackson admitted, “but I disagree. Actors only have so many chances to act. Why not do the thing that feeds you?”