Samuel L Jackson has played some seedy lowlifes in his time, yet we love him. It’s the drawling charm, the cool … But don’t be fooled: this is a man who kicked a 20-year drug habit to vie with Hollywood’s aristos. And he’s not done yet, writes Jim Shelley
Now that his name has started to appear above the titles of his movies, rather than simply at the top of the cast list, it is only a matter of time before Samuel L Jackson is invited to join Hollywood’s rather nebulous campaign to talk to the nation’s schoolchildren about drugs. But in Jackson’s case, as he says, “that would be, like, a really bad idea”.
In theory, he is the ideal candidate. For a start, he is probably not only the best supporting actor in the world, but currently the coolest star in Hollywood. With directors, actors and audience alike, Jackson is Sam the Man: young tyros, such as Ben Affleck and Vince Vaughn, or contemporaries, such as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, don’t even come close to Jackson’s kudos.
Also, Jackson is articulate and naturally candid about using drugs. He has been clean from both drink and drugs for the best part of eight years, and is a committed advocate of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. (Alcholics Anonymous less so, complaining that “everybody there’s pissed off because they can’t drink”.) His description of crack cocaine is vivid and sobering, as he relates how “it brought me to my knees”. On the other hand, when it comes to discussing the years when he was habitually taking everything from marijuana and speed to acid, angel dust and even heroin, his position is, “For 23 years, I was havin’ a good time! There’s no way I can tell kids, `It’s awful, don’t do it.'”
It sounds like denial, but Jackson insists he was “using drugs successfully for years. Life was good! I was goin’ to work every day, money in the bank, makin’ movies and playin’ on Broadway. I did things on stage that were phenomenal. I was bombed every night.”
Any mention of the (rather priggish) conventional wisdom that he was using drugs to escape his responsibilities or problems are met with raucous laughter. “Unhappy? No, I wasn’t unhappy,” he yells, with a grin as dazzling as a diamond. “I was happy. Hell, I was very happy. For a long time, heh-heh-heh. I didn’t get unhappy ’til the end, when I started smoking cocaine.” Hollywood’s anti-drug crusaders would contend that confessional openness and honesty are all very well, but, to paraphrase Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, this is a little more information than some people need to know.
Straight talking, though, is one of the more unusual and admirable traits of Samuel Leroy Jackson’s rise to fame. He is so easygoing that he will tell you how much he got paid for a movie, and how much he thinks a white star of his status would have got for the same role. He has often criticised the way his films have turned out – from National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I to this year’s Sphere – and even has no qualms about mentioning that he was practically the only black guy on the set of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.
As you can sense from his flair for long, flamboyant speeches in movies such as Pulp Fiction, Jackson likes talking – so much so that you wonder if he actually relishes being indiscreet, casually telling tales on directors as powerful as Joel Schumacher and Barry Levinson. (His digs at Spike Lee have escalated into an all-out feud – Jackson refused to work for basic pay on Malcolm X, and dismissed Lee’s attack on Jackie Brown as jealousy that Tarantino had made “a good, interesting black movie – something he hasn’t done in some time”. Even when playing it all down, and saying he doesn’t know whether they will work together again, Jackson can’t help mentioning, slyly, that nowadays, he “might be out of Spike’s price range”.)
His attitude confirms that he doesn’t conform to any of the stereotypes usually associated with either drugs or acting. For one thing, reformed addicts are not encouraged to reminisce about drugs with quite so much vigour. His viewpoint is, virtually, that in the Sixties, in his circles, “drugs was just one of those things. It was a part of what I did every day. There was something wrong with people who didn’t take drugs.” He got into heroin almost half-heartedly, for the simple reason that, when all the marijuana and other drugs were taken off the streets between 1969 and 1970 – “to defuse the black revolution” – heroin was all that was left. “Heroin never became a problem for me cos I used to OD a lot! Plus, I didn’t like being depressed! I like bein’ awake. And havin’ fun. It all depends on your state of mind and your attitude when you do it.”
But anyone who thinks all of this means he doesn’t take the subject, or the ramifications, of drugs seriously is falling for the sort of stereotype you can never really apply to him. The credit for making Jackson’s career is invariably given to Lee (who cast him in School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues before Jungle Fever) or Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown), but actually his big break was rehab. “If I was making the kind of money I’m making now, with the kind of appetite I had then,” he states, “you would not be sittin’ here talkin’ to me now. You’d have written my obituary years ago … “
Having started off beginning his days with a beer and a joint, he ended up arriving for auditions smelling of drink, smoking crack between acts.
He went into rehab when his wife and daughter found him slumped over the kitchen table, passed out, with a rock of cocaine still in his hand ready to smoke. One month in rehab and, in career terms, he “took off”, as if his talent and appetite had finally been let off the leash. “Yeah, I’ve thought about that,” he says sombrely. “I was in my own way for a very long time.”
The more you listen to him talk, the stronger you feel that, whatever the personal or professional lows of his life, Jackson always knew he was going to get there eventually. The self- confidence that exudes from the screen in virtually all his performances is evident the moment he walks in the room.
Certainly, the question of his own talent never seemed to be in doubt, even in the early days, when, having waited in vain for TV work, he ended up taking a commercial for the local fast-food chain. Even when he was doing things such as the TV series Spenser: For Hire, or being credited as “Gang Member No 2” (in Ragtime) or “Black Guy” (in Sea of Love, which was less than 10 years ago), it seems as if he thought of it as just a matter of biding his time.
Sure enough, in the past five years, he has appeared alongside John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone, and outshone them all. His performance in Jungle Fever was so good that the Cannes jury created a special prize for him.
It’s hard to think of many actors who have the kind of cult cool Jackson has earned from a string of quality independent films, and who can still command their own big studio vehicle, such as The Negotiator, a hostage thriller due for release in November. And with the careers of Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne and Wesley Snipes stalling somewhat, it won’t be long before Jackson is challenging his former theatre mentor, Morgan Freeman, for the title of the world’s most highly paid serious black actor.
Ask people what the secret of Jackson’s success is, and, besides acting talent, most of them will say his cool, his charm. This is one of the few things you can’t fake, no matter how good you are. Jackson is Sam the Man, what Tarantino would call “too cool for school”. In his latest role, as Louis Batiste, a small- town doctor and ladies’ man, in Eve’s Bayou (the most successful independent film in the United States last year, which he also co-produced), he has every woman in town succumbing to his smooth- talking.
All of which means we tend to ignore the sheer drive and determination it must have taken to get him here: to get through rehab first time; to keep going through fast-food commercials into bit- parts in movies such as Raw, or Ragtime, and on to Pulp Fiction and Die Hard III. As recently as 1991, after he had finished Jungle Fever, a piece in Time magazine said he was “filing for unemployment and looking for work”.
His determination first struck me while watching Jackie Brown, when, in the car near the end of the film, he turns his dead, red-eyed stare on Robert Forest; a look of total blinkered intent. I get another sight of it as we’re hiding from the hounding Los Angeles heat in an alleyway behind his agent’s office on Rodeo Drive. When I ask him to name one role he would have liked to have played, he doesn’t hesitate: Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The implication that he could maybe improve on De Niro’s efforts is noted.
The temptation to see Jackson as being as cool as his most famous characters is inevitably too strong. Mostly, it’s in the voice – a languid, lilting drawl, tinged with the light twang of Tennessee, that could, you feel, charm the birds out of the trees. As slim as a willow and 1,9m tall, his lean, angular face is handsome and assured, topped off when we meet by a cream Kangol cap and grey goatee, with stylish, studious- looking glasses. His dry, sceptical humour is invariably followed by wild, excitable howls of laughter.
An only child, he was born in Washington, and grew up in Chattanooga raised by his grandparents, his aunts and his mother, after his father, who’s now deceased, deserted them. There are echoes of his childhood in Eve’s Bayou, a touching, wonderfully acted early- Sixties rites-of-passage tale about family, infidelity and voodoo told through the eyes of a child, la To Kill a Mockingbird. As the big-city charmer constrained in a small town, Jackson makes Louis unlike any character he’s played before, cleverly intimating that he likes being a rascal, and that this is somehow irresistible to everyone, including his own wife and daughter.
After years of trying to get the project off the ground, Eve’s Bayou got the green light only after Jackson attached his name to it, thus raising the $3- million budget. (“Three million?” he smiles. “Is that all I’m worth?”) His pride at getting a film made about the life of an ordinary, black family rather than one about black life or black issues, is obvious, though he’s not expecting its success to start a rush.
Jackson thinks the largely feminine environment he grew up in saved him from “having constantly to prove myself”, and is mostly responsible for giving him his self-confidence. Was he extroverted as a kid? “Hell, yeah!” he says, enjoying one of his favourite phrases. “I was mad. I lived in a sort of fantasy world, inside books and TV. I could sit in front of the TV for hours and nobody ever told me it was pollutin’ my mind or corruptin’ my values.
“I still did good school work … Being an only child probably taught me how to use my sense of humour to, like, defuse a situation I was in, cos I had no brothers and sisters to back me up.”
Jackson is most associated with characters such as the charming but ruthless crooks in the Tarantino films, the slick, sleazy hustler in Hard Eight, the dope dealer/dude in Menace II Society, or the low-rent PI in The Long Kiss Goodnight, though this is misleading and testament to just how good an actor he really is. Even his fans forget he has been just as good playing doctors, teachers, lawyers or policemen in films such as Eve’s Bayou, 187, Losing Isaiah and Kiss of Death, and that these roles are probably closer to home.
The truth is, Jackson is approaching 50, celebrating his 17th year of marriage, and does the car-pool at his 15-year-old daughter’s school. The day we meet, rather than start the day with a joint and a tequila, he had a trip to the dermatologist and went shopping with his wife on Rodeo Drive. In PR terms, he is as professional as any star who now commands millions.
Six years ago, Jackson moved from New York to the San Fernando Valley, mainly, I would guess, to push his career along and because, he says, of the weather – which enables him to play 54 holes of golf a day. Music-wise, he says, “at the moment, I’m revisiting my Led Zeppelin collection. And I listen to Dark Side … at least once a month” (another case of more information than we really want to know).
People never look at him this way. As a veteran of theatre, he can probably be just as much of a luvvie about his profession as Kenneth Branagh: “LA is the only city I’ve been where you meet actors who’ve never done theatre.” He has turned down several films because he didn’t see why he should legitimise or jump-start the acting career of “some rapper or basketball star”.
Simply regarding him as being some cool dude, who’s somehow slick enough to do what he does, only demeans him and what he’s achieved. Besides, as he points out, he never really used to be that cool. Rather than Sam the Man, his nickname was Jacks or, “more likely, Sam the Dork … I dressed pretty much the way my mom wanted me to dress.”
As good as he is in the star roles, Jackson has avoided what he calls “standard studio fare – where you do the same thing over and over again” (even turning down roles in films with De Niro and Pacino), happy to build a career through memorable minor roles in good- quality, non-commercial films instead.
Besides Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and True Romance, and the Spike Lee quartet, he has had less-noted roles in Trees Lounge, Hard Eight, Juice, Menace II Society, Fresh, Johnny Suede, and an excellent two-minute cameo in the acclaimed forthcoming Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight. More importantly, he was just as memorable in major pictures such as Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, Sea of Love, GoodFellas and Coming to America. The variety of these characters is such that part of his appeal is what he calls playing “spot the Samuel Jackson”. “Even if the film’s not great, I’m always tryin’ to pick an interestin’ character, that I haven’t seen before …”
The pivotal role in his life was his truly desolate performance as the shambling, charming crack-addict, Gator, which, coming two weeks after he left rehab, was a role his counsellors strongly advised him to reject. “My attitude was, `If I never see you people again for the rest of my life, it’ll be too soon,'” he drawls. As it turned out, he maintains that the moment Gator’s father (played by Ossie Davis) shot him, “that person, that junkie I used to be, was dead to me”. When Oprah Winfrey saw him in Jungle Fever, she says her first thought was, “How the hell did they get a crack addict to turn up for work every day?” The detail in the performance (the jacket he wears with the sleeves rolled up, the angle of his baseball cap, the rhythm of his speech and his agitated dance as he talks) is about as good as you will ever see.
The first thing Jackson does with a script is scratch out all the stage directions, so the styling is pretty much his own. “Some writers can write, but most of them can’t act, so why are they giving me stage directions?” he asks pointedly. “In the script, it just said `dances’, but we didn’t know what the dance was. Spike kinda depends on the actors to come in and do what we do. He does his camera stuff. He doesn’t sit down and have long conversations about characters.”
Despite the award at Cannes, he lost out to Ed Wood’s Martin Landau for an Oscar, famously muttering “Shit!” on the TV close-ups when it was announced and refusing to be magnanimous about it ever since. “Yeah, well, I’ve seen Ed Wood, so don’t bullshit me, all right?” he mutters, still nursing the grudge. By contrast, he says Pulp Fiction was, “Ninety-five per cent all in the script. Quentin had that thing nailed.”
Jules, Ordell and Jimmy in Hard Eight are three of the genuinely, quietly menacing characters on film, and his favourites. “There are certain actors who want to be liked in every film they’re in. I don’t particularly care ’bout that,” he shrugs. “I don’t think I have to be Hollywood good-lookin’ all the time … I hate seein’ that thing when the character wakes up in the morning and their hair looks the same as the night before and you know their mouth tastes the same as when they went to sleep.”
His action movies, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Die Hard III, are also among his favourites, not least, you suspect, because of what he got paid. (As for the third, he says of Sphere, “I prefer my monster movies to have monsters in – but that’s just me.”) “Action films are great – playing cops and robbers, doin’ all this stuff that you did as kids, except I’m shootin’ people and their chests are blowin’ up and their heads are blowin’ up and, you’ll be, like, Damn! Nobody’s sayin’, `You missed me.'”
His next project is another Renny Harlin movie, Deep Blue Sea, “about fucken sharks and shit”. He is not, despite the current vogue, interested in directing himself (“Hell, no”) and his attitude towards the idea of working with any directors in particular once again suggests that he believes he doesn’t need any help.
“I never think about directors – they just kinda come with the project, so, nah, I ain’t interested in seeing them `in action’. What the hell does that mean?” He still wants to do low-budget movies: “If I read something I like, my agents and managers tend to know they work for me, and I’m gonna do it.” As for what he wants for the rest of his career, he says, “I don’t know if I can be any more famous than I am now. I can make more money, but I don’t know if I can be more famous,” which seems either naive or just disingenuous, given that, besides The Negotiator, and the Renny Harlin movie, he’s also in the new Star Wars film.
On the table, a book called Celebrities’ Favourite Rooms includes his buddy Travolta inside his Lear jet. Jackson likes to point out, when he’s in New York, that he still takes the subway. The difference is, of course, that people like Travolta and Tom Cruise don’t want to go on the subway. That, in many ways, is what their fame is for – a means of not having to.
As he says, the next step up, into the higher plane inhabited by the likes of Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson et al, will greatly depend on whether his name can open The Negotiator with the kind of box-office numbers they would. His nervousness that, if it doesn’t, his name will be the one “to be punished”, rather than co-star Kevin Spacey’s (“He has his Academy Award”) suggests it matters to him more than he might want to admit.
This desire has not tempered his easy way of mentioning issues such as Hollywood’s difficulties with black actors such as himself doing love scenes with white actresses such as Geena Davis, and scripts that were originally meant for white actors (The Long Kiss Goodnight and 187, for example) being changed accordingly. In the case of A Time to Kill, Jackson also talked openly about how he felt when the director took his most powerful speech away in the edit and gave it to his (white) co-star and supposed hotshot, Matthew McConaughey.
Like the rest of us, Hollywood would be wise not to think of Jackson as too cool to push himself further and simply rest on the laurels of Pulp Fiction. He says he is now at the stage where he “looks at stuff they offer Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford that they don’t want to do”. “Everybody sends their script to Tom Cruise, no matter the story. I’m sure Tom’s fingerprints are probably on everything at a certain point. So I will see the things he’s turned down, but not before some guy like Matt Damon, or whoever’s moment it is.”
When I wonder how many of these roles he reckons he doesn’t get because he’s black, he quickly points out, “First of all, nobody would ever tell me it was because I was black,” which rather goes without saying. As for the answer, he thinks about it, and then says, “Out of all the things I read, roles that I would want … maybe 25% to 30%.” He doesn’t make anything out of it. But I would say these are the roles Samuel L Jackson wants. The roles I bet he gets.