The flopped film Samuel L Jackson hated making: “I didn’t have such a great time”
Throughout his career, Samuel L Jackson has always been an actor who likes to have fun. He likes starring in movies that mass audiences want to see, and he loves the reputation he’s built as one of the coolest people in Hollywood. This exalted status allows him to be outspoken about the business and people within it, and he will never shy away from telling it like it is. However, this doesn’t mean he often dishes the dirt on bad times he’s had or people he disliked working with. In fact, he reportedly hated working on a 2008 comedy but didn’t say a word about it for five years – and even then, he played his cards pretty close to his chest.
In truth, the only long-running beef Jackson has ever had in his career has been his complicated relationship with Spike Lee. Interestingly, that relationship is tangentially related to Jackson’s difficult experience in 2008 when he made Soul Men with his good pal Bernie Mac. You see, the director of that movie was Malcolm D Lee, who is Spike’s cousin – and he didn’t see eye to eye with Jackson at all.
To give the story its full context, we must go back to 1992. At that point, Jackson had starred in three of Spike’s first five movies: School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. It was his role as crack addict Gator in Jungle Fever that finally put Jackson on the map in Hollywood, though, and he was delighted to find out the Cannes Film Festival had created its first ‘Best Supporting Performance Award’ specifically to honour him. Jackson was soon approached to star as an FBI agent in the thriller White Sands, but Spike also wanted him in a small but pivotal role in his upcoming biopic Malcolm X.
“I was supposed to be the guy that turned Malcolm X onto Islam in prison,” Jackson revealed in 2023. “I forget who played that role. But it was still down to that Spike Lee scale-plus-ten salary thing. I was like, ‘I’m not going to work for no scale-plus-ten.'” In essence, Jackson was being lowballed on pay by Spike, and when he chose to make White Sands instead, he admitted, “We fell out.”
Over the years, Jackson and Spike would occasionally butt heads, mainly over Jackson being Quentin Tarantino’s lucky charm. Spike voiced his concerns multiple times over Tarantino’s fondness for using the N-word in his movies, and he even called Django Unchained – in which Jackson played a controversial role as a villainous house slave – disrespectful to his ancestors.
None of this was enough to put Jackson off working with Spike’s cousin Malcolm, though, a director in his own right known for comedies like Undercover Brother and The Best Man. However, maybe it should have, because the movie they made together was a complete flop, and the two men struggled to get along during production.
When Playboy magazine asked Jackson in 2013 if he and Spike working together on the Oldboy remake was a sign they’d hashed out their feud and Tarantino-related differences, Jackson gave an unexpected answer. He revealed that they’d simply resolved not to talk about controversial subjects – and this included Malcolm, too.
“We didn’t have that conversation,” Jackson mused. “One thing I’ve learned is that when I’m hired to do the job, that’s what I do. I did a film with Bernie Mac that was directed by Spike’s cousin that I didn’t have such a great time doing. We didn’t talk about that either.”
In fact, Jackson admitted that any conversation about Malcolm and Soul Men amounted to little more than him asking, “How’s he doing?” to which Spike answered, “Oh, he’s fine. You guys didn’t get along so well, did you?” Jackson shook his head and deadpanned, “No, we didn’t” – and that was that. As the iconic Pulp Fiction star put it, “Boom. That was the end of it. One thing had nothing to do with the other.”
