At 69, Samuel L Jackson is looking good. He’s softly spoken for the most part, with a voice that’s instantly recognizable. He’s also, of course, one of the biggest movie stars on earth. But it’s been a long journey to get to this place – his success was hard-fought, coming later in his career than it does for most.
Jackson made his film debut in 1972’s Together For Days, a drama set during the racially charged civil rights movement of the time – a world he was active in. But the general consensus says it wasn’t until 1994’s Pulp Fiction – his 30th film – that he became the big movie star. He laughs at the suggestion.
“Did I? Well, I became a recognizable star after that film, but I don’t know about a big star.” But it must have changed his life, surely?
“Actually, here’s the thing,” he says. “Bruce Willis and I were doing Die Hard with a Vengeance when Pulp Fiction came out and we went to Cannes together to watch Pulp Fiction play for the first time. We both thought, ‘Wow, this is great!’ and Bruce said, ‘Yeah, this is good and this film will make you recognizable, but Die Hard’s going to make you a star. Die Hard will change your life.’ And it’s true. Die Hard with a Vengeance was the highest-grossing film in the world that year. That changed the agenda.”
It’s also the character the related to most. “That was the only time I perceived myself as playing myself, because it was my job to be the audience member on the inside of a Die Hard film reacting to John McClane the way an audience member would react,” he explains. This metanarrative makes you want to watch the film again to see him reacting as you, the viewer. It’s a smarter role than perhaps many people thought and clearly influential in his career.
That change in agenda brought him a run of hit films, with a total worldwide box office tally of more than US $5.1 billion – more than any other actor on earth. He really knows how to pick a hit – although he puts it down to “getting lucky sometimes” – and says not finding success until his mid-40s was probably a good thing. “I was sober when it happened so that helped a lot. If it had happened sooner in my life, I would have found a way to mess it up. Being sober and understanding who I was, and what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to shape the trajectory of my career, was a result of me being more mature, but I always attribute it to my sobriety and not listening to everything people say when they tell you how great you are.”
The road to this point in his life has been hard work. He grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised by a single mother, having only ever met his father twice. He attended segregated schools and suffered from a stutter as a child. His frequent swearing was his way of getting past that stutter. He attended the all-male African American liberal arts college Morehouse, where he became involved in the civil rights movement. After the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Jackson attended his funeral. “It was held on the campus of Morehouse, King’s alma mater, so I ended up being an usher,” he says. “I’d been to Spellman College in Atlanta to see the body laying in state, then I went to Memphis to march with the garbage workers, and then we flew back the next day for the funeral.”
A year later, Jackson was suspended from Morehouse for two years and convicted of a second-degree felony when he and several other students held members of the college board of trustees hostage to demand school reform. It’s also been widely reported that in his youth he was a member of the Black Panthers, but he insists it’s not true and has no idea where the story came from. He was, however, part of the fight for equal rights in the Sixties – and he’s not surprised by the US’s apparent turn towards intolerance.
“I don’t see it as some kind of anomaly. People weren’t as open in the past when it was maybe politically incorrect to espouse some of the ideas that they can now say out loud,” he says. “I never thought people stopped thinking it, but now it’s as vocal as it was when I grew up during segregation. If there was a way the country’s leaders could keep certain ethnicities from going to certain things or being in some positions then they would do that, because that seems to be the dynamic right now.
I hear things like ‘make America great again’ and by ‘again,’ they mean going back to the day when a white man held all the power, women were home cooking and having babies, and the rest of the races were subservient in some way. There are a lot of things that can’t and won’t be changed because of the blood and the effort that was put in during the civil rights movement, but there are a lot of dynamics that are trying to be put back into place because of that.”
Is he hopeful for the future? “I’d like to be. The stance that young people are taking on guns and violence in schools is very encouraging. They’ve found their voice. A lot of those young people are going to be of voting age by 2020. They can change the dynamic around the country. Their voices will be heard. They’re registering to vote in record numbers and recognizing that they do have power in numbers and that their actions can be effective in getting rid of the people who are standing in their way.”
He sees this same fight for change in his industry – and also here, it’s the young people leading the charge. “The artist community is forever changing, and young filmmakers are telling stories from different perspectives in terms of a world they grew up in that’s inhabited by all kinds of people. The fact that they have a certain kind of interaction allows them to shape their stories in a different way than it was before, so they can color their stories with all the ethnicities. They don’t perceive all black people to be criminals, they don’t perceive all Mexicans to be laborers, or all Asians to be the smartest people in the room. Young people are the lifeblood of what is about to happen – and they are all telling their stories.”
The recent critical and box office success of Marvel’s Black Panther is being seen as a key moment in the positive portrayal of black people in lead roles, but despite the plaudits, Jackson doesn’t believe it’s quite the watershed moment. “I’m not positive that Black Panther is going to change the dynamic of black stories being told in Hollywood and being accepted all over the world,” he says. “It’s an action-adventure story and a lot of people like those, and they’ll work all over the world forever because everybody loves a hero. But not everybody loves a drama about somebody’s life experience – that’s why awards have a separate category for foreign films; they are perceived as being different. Once we stop perceiving them as different and just see them as good films and they get recognized in the same category, we’ll be laying markers.”.More photos below.
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