The one movie that inspired Samuel L Jackson’s career: “This is a dynamite performance”
It’s not an easy feat to become the highest-grossing actor in all of movie history, and Samuel L Jackson has had to work and work hard in order to reach that title.
Over the decades, he has been in not just some of the most successful, but some of the best movies ever to be released, including Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas and Jurassic Park. However, his rise to the top was anything but simple.
For a start, Jackson didn’t even have a TV growing up, being partly raised by his grandparents, he would instead listen to the radio and invent pictures to go along with the stories he heard, while also developing a stutter – not something any aspiring actor is particularly going to find helpful.
After an adolescence marked by suffering racism and segregated education, Jackson found an interest in theatre and in the civil rights movement; attending Martin Luther King’s funeral as an usher and landing himself on the FBI’s list as a possible Black Panther member.
He founded his own theatre group and took jobs acting in 1970s blaxploitation movies before moving to New York City, where he appeared on stage in A Soldier’s Play, the story of a US army sergeant murdered in the South, notably alongside him in the original cast was a certain Denzel Washington. It was thanks to Jackson’s stellar fucking performance in that production that he caught the eye of Spike Lee, who would go on to direct him in Mo’ Better Blues and Do the Right Thing.
It was discovering independent cinema, and the work of a young actor in one film in particular, that inspired Jackson to pursue movie-making full-time after dabbling in both marine biology and architecture. He told Deadline: “I remember watching this film, a film that touched me really. This film called The Education of Sonny Carson. And, which was like this gritty New York, you know, film about, you know, gangs and whatever, and.. watching this kid acting in that movie, I eventually met, when he became a really good friend of mine, you know? It was really awesome.”
That actor was Rony Clanton, who would eventually appear in films including The Devil’s Advocate alongside Al Pacino and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. The Education of Sonny Carson, meanwhile, was a 1974 drama telling the true-life story of a Black Korean War veteran who began to question why he could serve his country but not drink from the same water fountains as his white countrymen.
Jackson added: “(I was) watching him and saying, ‘Wow, this is a dynamite performance.’ I would love to get, you know. to a place where I could present myself like this, or be a character that has a profound effect on somebody, you know, the way that, you know, that kid had on me at that particular time.”
Of course, Jackson went on to do exactly that and then some, firstly in those Spike Lee joints and then as Hollywood royalty, putting in fantastic performances in action movies like Die Hard with a Vengeance and Renny Harlin’s brilliant The Long Kiss Goodnight, which is now rightfully starting to be thought of as one of the best films of the 1990s.
That’s aside from appearing in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and then arguably his most iconic and certainly his most quotable role in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction a year later. The next 30 years would bring Jackson Star Wars and Marvel, Kingsman and Pixar, and he certainly doesn’t seem anywhere near finished yet, with a raft of movies on the way, including another one with Harlin, a movie about the US President’s armoured car called The Beast.
