The death scene that fulfilled Samuel L Jackson’s dream: “Finally got my chance”
Being an actor occasionally means coming close to death. I mean, sometimes quite literally, as is the case for actors who have narrowly escaped their fates during filming (like Isla Fisher almost drowning during Now You See Me).
But then there’s the many times actors have had to pretend to be dead for a role, coming face to face with their own mortality in the process. It’s surely quite traumatising having to simulate a horrible death on screen, although some stars have gotten used to it, like Samuel L Jackson, who has certain kinds of deaths he has always wanted to act out.
It’s nice to know that not everyone is terrified of the concept of their own mortality, because Jackson will willingly throw himself into parts that see him die a grisly death. It’s just acting, after all. He once told Deseret News, “So far, I haven’t been hung or garroted. But I’m willing to learn. I’m an actor who’ll do anything.”
How do you convincingly look dead on screen? Well, you’d think that all it takes is lying as still as possible, but it’s more than that. If the camera is on you while you’re being killed, you have to capture that energy leaving your body – and how do you do that when you’re alive? Death is one of the most incomprehensible things in this life, so the challenge of accurately conveying that is no easy task.
There was one specific way he always wanted to go, and in 1991’s Jungle Fever, directed by Spike Lee, Jackson got to fulfil this bizarrely morbid dream of his. The movie explores an interracial relationship between Wesley Snipes’ Flipper and Annabella Sciorra’s Angie, with Jackson playing Flipper’s brother, a crack addict named Gator.
Sadly, his character doesn’t make it, dying after getting shot. Here, Jackson found his time to shine. “Dying is a happening thing. I always wanted to die with my eyes open, to see if I could make my eyes gloss over, then not blink. Finally got my chance in Jungle Fever.”
That’s not an easy thing to bring to a performance, but Jackson is a fantastic actor, so of course, he was able to make it work. It seems like Jackson really gets a kick out of dying on screen, because he reportedly requested that his character be dramatically killed when he appeared in Deep Blue Sea. Infamously, his character is devoured by a CGI shark, but this shocked many viewers, who didn’t think that someone as famous as Jackson would be killed off in the movie so soon.
Yet, like Drew Barrymore’s character dying at the start of Scream, you sometimes have to expect the unexpected, because it’s never out of the question for the biggest actor in the cast list to die first.
Jackson’s propensity for dying on screen has seen him stabbed, eaten by velociraptors, involved in a car crash, and even turned to dust. Clearly, he doesn’t fear the idea of mortality, because death really is the only thing guaranteed in life, and confronting it various times on screen surely makes this easier.
