The movie Samuel L Jackson thinks he should have won an Oscar for: “They weren’t trying to make me a star”
Based solely on the number of memorable performances he’s given across a cavalcade of classic movies spanning more than 30 years, it boggles the mind that Samuel L Jackson has only ever been nominated for one competitive Academy Award.
He was the overwhelming favourite to win when Pulp Fiction became the talk of the town in the lead-up to the Oscars, only for the star to be left visibly furious on camera when Ed Wood‘s Walter Matthau was named ‘Best Supporting Actor’ instead. Sure, he got an honorary prize in 2021, but a solitary nod for a man of his talents remains a genuine head-scratcher.
Jackson is the single highest-grossing actor in history, though, which is a unique accolade that may not be taken away from him for a while unless somebody else takes his place as cinema’s foremost purveyor of billion-dollar hits and regular fixture of monolithic franchises.
He was pissed off when he walked away empty-handed for Pulp Fiction, but he was even more indignant when a performance he believed was Oscar-worthy didn’t even make it to the screen in the way he performed it. Once the scissors came out in post-production, Jackson knew his chances had been thwarted by circumstances out of his control.
Arriving at the height of the short-lived John Grisham craze, 1996’s star-studded A Time to Kill featured Jackson alongside Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Ashley Judd, Chris Cooper and more. The frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator played a grieving father who avenges the rape of his daughter by gunning down the men responsible.
The crux of the narrative focuses on the trial of Jackson’s Carl Lee Hailey, defended by McConaughey’s idealistic lawyer in an area of rural America that’s virtually declared him guilty already. It did land him on the shortlist for the Golden Globes, but the star thought he deserved better for the work he put in.
“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 to Vulture, illustrating the bond between his character and daughter Tonya. “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. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, ‘What the fuck?'”
Jackson said of the excised footage that “the things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar,” and he has his suspicions about why it was removed. “It wasn’t my movie, and they weren’t trying to make me a star,” he suggested. “That was one of the first times that I saw that shit happen.” He thinks the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ trophy would have been his for the taking based on the scenes he filmed, but in the end, his turn in A Time to Kill wasn’t even under consideration.
