The deleted 1996 scene that cost Samuel L Jackson an Oscar: “Really, motherfuckers?”
Technically, Samuel L Jackson is an Academy Award-winning actor, but the honorary award he received in 2021 wasn’t a competitive gong, so if you want to split hairs, he’s not really an Academy Award-winning actor.
That’s not a matter of personal opinion, either, since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t count honorary prizes in its official tallies, which is why Paul Newman was so thrilled that he finally claimed his long-awaited Oscar for The Color of Money, the year after he was first honoured.
Jackson has claimed that he’s not interested in awards, which is just as well, because he doesn’t have too many. He won a Bafta for Pulp Fiction and the Cannes Film Festival brought back its rare ‘Best Actor’ accolade to specifically reward him for his performance in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, and that’s about it.
Not that he’ll be too distraught, since he’s the highest-grossing actor in cinema history, and having made his peace with the fact he’s highly unlikely to ever take the stage and collect a performative Oscar of his own, the veteran is fully living the dream of making what he wants whenever he wants and refusing to give a fuck what the critics or awards bodies have to say.
Rules tend to have exceptions, though, and for someone who’s repeatedly claimed that they don’t care about being showered in accolades by their peers, Jackson remains as pissed off as ever that a solitary deleted scene from Joel Schumacher’s 1996 courtroom thriller, A Time to Kill, robbed him of the golden baldie he was adamant his work would have merited.
“There were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out,” he explained, referring to his character, Carl Lee Hailey, relaying to his daughter that he murdered the men who assaulted her to make it clear that he “will do anything to protect her.” That was pretty clear in the final cut, but not clear enough, according to Jackson.
“And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it,” he sighed. “When I saw it, I was sitting there, like, ‘What the fuck?'” More than anything, he was as furious as he was back in the mid-90s that “the things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar.”
“Really, motherfuckers?” he rhetorically asked in typical fashion. “You just took that shit from me? My first day working on that film, I did a speech in a room with an actor, and the whole fucking set was in tears when I finished. I was like, ‘OK, I’m on the right page’. That shit is not in the movie! And I know why it’s not. Because it wasn’t my movie, and they weren’t trying to make me a star.”
He’s sort of right, since you could say that it was Matthew McConaughey’s movie, and it did go a long way to making him a star. On the other hand, Jackson gives the best performance in A Time to Kill by far, and despite netting a Golden Globe nomination for it, you can’t convince him otherwise that had that deleted scene been kept in the picture, he’d have an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ to his name.
