“You can’t find anywhere”: the co-star who mesmerised Samuel L Jackson
With over 200 film and television credits to his name and status as the highest-grossing actor in cinema history with a back catalogue of classics covering everything from award-winning dramas to billion-dollar blockbusters, there isn’t much capable of leaving Samuel L Jackson mesmerised at this stage in his career.
After all, the coolest cat in Hollywood is well into his 70s and has been acting on stage, screen, and TV since the early 1970s, so there isn’t much he hasn’t encountered. From his low-budget independent days to his star-making Pulp Fiction breakthrough and into his current stage as an enduringly popular icon, Jackson has been around the block more than most.
He’s been in his fair share of franchises and reprised many roles, too, but one sequel saw him coming face-to-face with a performer the likes of which he’d never seen before. That takes some doing, considering the legends and superstars he’s shared the screen with during his decades in the spotlight, but it was high praise that was richly deserved.
The film itself might not have been up to much and resolutely failed to live up to the sky-high expectations many audience members had going in. Still, if there was one element of M Night Shyamalan’s trilogy-closing Glass that didn’t disappoint, it was James McAvoy’s multi-pronged tour-de-force.
The actor was in tremendous form in Split as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with disassociative identity disorder struggling to keep his multitude of different personalities in check. However, he needed to raise his game to the next level when the follow-up pitted him against the returning Unbreakable duo of Jackson’s Elijah Price and Bruce Willis’ David Dunn.
Needless to say, McAvoy stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park to give every single one of them a distinct sense of individuality, with Jackson barely able to comprehend how he did it. “How the fuck do you do that?” he asked Rolling Stone. “There were times where I was sitting in front of McAvoy and there’s four people having a conversation with me, and sometimes they stop and argue with each other, and then they come back to me. I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.'”
Describing his work as “acting class shit that you can’t find anywhere,” he was suitably blown away by Drumchapel’s favourite son. “He could keep them all in a specific place where he can reach in and grab them,” Jackson explained. “And give them their own specific voice, their own diction, their own attitude, all that shit’s there. They also have their own body mannerisms, which is like, how do you keep up with that shit?”
The answer is probably with great difficulty but impressively nonetheless. Because his two turns came in heightened genre thrillers, McAvoy arguably didn’t get the credit he deserved for what might well be career-best work. Jackson had never seen anything like it, though, which is high praise in itself.
