The box office king and Trump golf antagonist beat a crack addiction to build a film career unrivaled in modern stardom, and the 70-year-old 'Glass' actor aims to work well into his 80s — if Marvel and the rest of Hollywood can afford him: "I'm a gunslinger now."
He arrives exactly on schedule, not a minute early, not a minute late, and comes dressed in character: Armani cashmere shirt, translucent Alain Mikli eyeglasses and, of course, a Kangol cap. There are no formalities, no handshakes, no, "Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Samuel L. Jackson." He simply strolls into the restaurant in midtown Manhattan — a short walk from the $13 million condo he shares with his wife of 38 years, LaTanya Richardson, who's currently starring as Calpurnia in Aaron Sorkin's Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird — slips into a corner booth and buries his face behind a menu.
"Go ahead," he says. "I'm listening."
This is how the world's most successful actor begins an interview.
That superlative is not a total exaggeration; it's been scientifically proven. Jackson, who just celebrated his 70th birthday, is "the most influential actor of all time," according to a study published in December in Applied Network Science that used an algorithm to measure various actors' impact on pop culture (Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise came in second and third). In September, Box Office Mojo did its own calculation, naming Jackson Hollywood's most bankable star. His 120-plus movies — from tentpoles (Jurassic Park and the Star Wars prequels) to art house hits like Pulp Fiction to campy horror neo-classics like Snakes on a Plane — have earned a grand total of $5.76 billion at the U.S. box office (well ahead of Harrison Ford's $4.96 billion and Tom Hanks' $4.6 billion), and a staggering $13.3 billion worldwide.
Of course, a big chunk of those billions comes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (nine of the highest-grossing films of the past decade), in which Jackson plays Avengers boss Nick Fury, a role he took up almost as a lark in 2008 and is about to reprise yet again in Captain Marvel, opening March 8. But just a few months before that, on Jan. 19, he'll also be starring in another superhero sequel, Glass, M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to 2000's Unbreakable, in which Jackson again plays Elijah Price, also known as Mr. Glass, a brittle-boned, wheelchair-bound genius on the hunt for mutants among us (think Magneto in a Frederick Douglass wig). Even if you don't count his ubiquitous Capital One commercials — for which he earns eight figures a year — you don't need an algorithm to compute just how big a first quarter this may be for Jackson, who has averaged about five movies a year for the past three decades.
"That's his superpower," says Shyamalan. "He genuinely loves to entertain people. It's something he finds great pride in." Of course, being the most famous badass on the silver screen, deliverer of some of cinema's most beloved obscenity-laden bon mots, has its downside. The shouts of "Hey, call me a motherfucker!" from fans on the street aren't always a welcome distraction. But Jackson has learned to be cool with it (he couldn't resist commending freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib's recent use of his favorite epithet, tweeting that he wanted to "wholeheartedly endorse your use of & clarity of purpose when declaring your Motherfucking goal" of impeaching President Trump). He's learned to be cool with everything. "You know how many actors go through their careers and people can't repeat one fucking line they ever had?" he says after putting down the menu. "I'm a walking T-shirt. It's better than not being known for anything."
Brian Bowen Smith
"There's people that turn things down when you're the third, fourth choice," says Jackson. "Motherfucker, I was nobody's choice for a long time. So the fuck I care? Yeah, I'll do it."
Brian Bowen Smith
"He genuinely loves to entertain people," says Glass director M. Night Shyamalan of Jackson. "It's something he finds great pride in."
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Jackson has become such a pop culture icon that screenplays are not just being written for him — as Quentin Tarantino did with 1994's Pulp Fiction — but about him: A script called The Kings of Cool landed on this year's Black List survey of the industry's best unproduced screenplays. Over lunch, I read him the logline: "During segregation in the 1960s American South, a nerdy teen tries to win a student election at an all-black high school, but he'll have to defeat a blossoming badass named Samuel L. Jackson to do so." At first he nods slowly but says nothing. Then I mention the name of the screenwriter: Jon Dorsey. For the first time in our conversation, a broad smile crosses Jackson's face. "Is that William Dorsey's son?" he asks (the answer is yes, it is). "That was the guy who ran against me for student body president. But I was the nerdy teen. He was the cool guy. Dorsey was way cooler than I was." Who won the election? "I did," Jackson says, still smiling.
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Samuel L. Jackson on 'Pulp Fiction,' "Bad Guys," and 'Glass' | Fishing for Answers
One of his earliest memories is of playing a Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker at age 3. "And I remember some Western-themed pageant where I had bells on my ankles and wrists and a loincloth and long Indian headdress," he says. "And I remember being Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall." It was his aunt who first pushed him onto the stage; his mom, a government worker, had left him to be raised by her sister in Tennessee for most of his early childhood. His father wasn't in the picture; in fact, Jackson met him only twice before he died. The first time he was too young to remember, but the second was when Jackson was in his 30s, while crisscrossing the country in a bus-and-truck theater tour. He had decided to pay a visit with his newborn daughter — Zoe Jackson, now 36 and a supervising producer on Bravo's Top Chef — to his paternal grandmother while passing through Kansas City. She'd always been sweet to him, sending him birthday and Christmas cards. But Jackson didn't realize until he arrived at her home that his father was still living with her.
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"We talked," he recalls. "He started telling me about all the other kids he had. 'You have brothers and sisters here and there.' I'm going, 'You know, I'm good being an only child.'"
Growing up in the segregated South and coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, Jackson found himself at the nexus of radical politics. As a student at the all-male, historically black Morehouse College, he'd been an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral in 1968, but after King's assassination he began to relate more to non-pacifist activists, like H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. "It was easier for me to side with their ideology [than with King's]," he explains, "or understand that 'violence is as American as cherry pie,' as Brown put it. That made sense to me, you know? Somebody hits you, you hit them back."
Jackson's politics today are more modulated, but he still doesn't believe in pulling punches. "When I hear 'Make America Great Again,' I hear something else. When I see the president and Mitch McConnell and Jeff Sessions going on with that twang, that's a trip in memory hell. And that does anger me."
Brian Bowen Smith
"I've been reported to Twitter a lot," Jackson says with a laugh. "Whatever. But sometimes I'll get a call from my representatives and they'll go, 'Can you not tweet for a while?'"
Brian Bowen Smith
"We would smoke cigarettes together in the rain under this awning where we were shooting in Chicago," Jackson recalls of his Losing Isaiah co-star Jessica Lange. "It was fun. But I never said, 'Hey Jessica, I used to watch you while smoking crack' or nothing."
Like everybody else these days, he often expresses that anger on Twitter, where he has 7.7 million followers. In recent months, he's called the president a "busted condom" and a "hemorrhoid" and once, in 2016, got into a tweet war with the then-candidate, accusing Trump of cheating during a golf game. When Trump responded that he and Jackson had never teed off together, Jackson posted the receipt from their game. "I've been reported to Twitter a lot," he says with a laugh. "Whatever. But sometimes I'll get a call from my representatives and they'll go, 'Can you not tweet for a while?'"
It was also during the 1960s that Jackson began experimenting with drugs, a habit that clung to him for years and nearly destroyed his life. It started when a Merry Prankster-esque professor turned him on to LSD, but Jackson quickly branched out into heroin, cocaine and, by the 1980s, crack. That last one stuck, and for 15 years he maintained a mostly functional addiction, smoking crack the way some people drink Starbucks lattes.
In the early 1990s, Jackson was understudying on Broadway for the lead in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. "I had to sit there every night on the steps behind the theater and listen to Charles Dutton do that part," Jackson says. "I'd sit there and smoke crack while I listened to the play. It made me fucking crazy. Because I'd be listening to him doing the lines and going, 'That's not right!'"
One night, Jackson looked down from a perch while puffing on a glass pipe and spotted Jessica Lange below, taking a smoke break while appearing in A Streetcar Named Desire across the street. A few years later, the two were starring together in Losing Isaiah. "We would smoke cigarettes together in the rain under this awning where we were shooting in Chicago," Jackson recalls. "It was fun. But I never said, 'Hey Jessica, I used to watch you while smoking crack' or nothing."
For Jackson, rock bottom arrived when his wife and daughter discovered him lying face-down and unconscious on the kitchen floor, surrounded by drug paraphernalia. Richardson — who refers to this period as her "villa in hell" — insisted Jackson go to rehab, which he did. He was ready. "I'd been getting high since, shit, 15, 16 years old, and I was tired as fuck," he says. While detoxing, he was sent a script by Spike Lee, for whom he had already done a string of smaller roles in films like Do the Right Thing and Mo' Better Blues. Lee wanted him to play Gator, the crackhead brother of Wesley Snipes' character in the interracial romance Jungle Fever. Ironically, the first role Jackson would take as a sober actor would require him to play a crack addict. "All the people in rehab were trying to talk me out of it," he recalls. " 'You're going to be messing around with crack pipes. All your triggers will be there. Blah, blah, blah.' I was like, 'You know what? If for no other reason than I never want to see you motherfuckers again, I will never pick up another drug.' 'Cause I hated their asses."
Brian Bowen Smith
"The whole time I was using, sure, I had a good reputation," says Jackson of his addict years. "I showed up on time, I did my lines. I was great. But there was something that was keeping me from getting to that next place."
Miramax Films/Photofest
With John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
Around the time of the movie's release, Jackson had an inside joke with his agent, Toni Howard of ICM Partners, who has represented him for 25 years. Jackson had watched over a number of years as members of his circle of actor friends — first Morgan Freeman, then Denzel Washington, then Snipes, then Laurence Fishburne — would jet off to Hollywood to make names for themselves. "I'd call my agent and say, 'Hollywood call?' And she'd always go, 'No.'" But when Jungle Fever premiered at Cannes in 1991 — Lee did not fly Jackson to the festival, explaining that there was only budget to bring "the stars" — Jackson's performance as Gator caused such a sensation that the jury honored it with the festival's first, and only, best supporting actor award. "That day I'm out at some audition," Jackson recalls, "and I called my agent, and said, 'Did Hollywood call?' And she's like, 'As a matter of fact, they kind of did.'" Lee has never apologized to Jackson for leaving his breakout star back in the U.S. "Not only that," Jackson says, "when he came back, he didn't actually give me my goddamn award for, like, eight months!"
It didn't matter. Jackson's canonization by the international film community changed everything. "That was pretty much the end of me beating the pavement in New York," he says. A slew of film roles started coming his way: Patriot Games, Amos and Andrew, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon. For those early parts, he was never the first choice — "Every script had, shit, Forest Whitaker, Denzel, Larry Fishburne's fingerprints," he recalls — but he was thrilled to have a seat at the table. He was also earning big paychecks. "I got to Hollywood at the right time, when the second-fiddle check was better than the leading-man check is now. Hollywood was just throwing money at movies."
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