The one role that broke Samuel L Jackson: “I totally felt like I was doing it so amazingly”
Few actors come across as confident and self-assured as Samuel L Jackson. He’s had a fantastic career, played a ton of iconic characters, and will always be the coolest dude in any room in Hollywood. Fascinatingly, though, Jackson has admitted things weren’t always so rosy in his career, and he once got so attached to a part that, when things didn’t work out the way he anticipated, he had a debilitating crisis of confidence. In fact, his reaction was so bad that it landed him in a rehab centre.
In 2024, Jackson signed up to play Doaker Charles in Netflix’s adaptation of August Wilson’s 1987 play The Piano Lesson. Set in Pittsburgh in 1936, during the Great Depression, the play follows the Charles family’s fraught discussions of what to do with a family heirloom—a piano complete with carvings etched by an enslaved ancestor.
However, this new film version wasn’t Jackson’s first experience with the harrowing play. In ’87, when it was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, Jackson starred as Boy Willie, Doaker’s son. Then, when it was revived on Broadway in 2022, Jackson graduated to the role of Doaker, and John David Washington took the part of Boy Willie. The two men then carried those roles into the Netflix film.
Despite the fact he has now aged into the part of Doaker, Jackson can’t shake his deep, abiding connection to the part of Boy Willie. Of that ’87 production, he told Newsweek, “It was great. I only did it because Charles Dutton was doing Crocodile Dundee 2 at the time, so I had the opportunity to create Boy Willie. I became very attached to it—probably a little too much.”
Indeed, by the time the play moved to Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, Dutton (Alien 3) had stepped in as Boy Willie and Jackson was relegated to understudy status. Jackson confessed, “I was pretty much devastated that I wasn’t going to make my Broadway debut.”
It was especially hurtful for Jackson because he felt he inhabited the character perfectly but could never escape the fact that Wilson had specifically crafted the part with Dutton in mind. Jackson told IndieWire, “The Piano Lesson broke me. I totally felt like I was doing it so amazingly that even though it was written for Charles, they were going to say, ‘You know what, Charles, let him do it.’ And they didn’t.”
During this period, while Jackson’s self-confidence took a nosedive, he developed crippling addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and heroin – which he overdosed on many times. He told Newsweek that he was drowning himself “in a drug-fueled kind of craziness and ended up in rehab, which, you know, started a whole other journey for me.” Indeed, after his family convinced him to seek help, he emerged a very different man who finally had a clearheaded approach to his acting work.
Ironically, though, the first part he played after getting clean and sober was crack cocaine addict “Gator” in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. It was a revelation for the star, who admitted, “I hadn’t done anything without a substance in my body” until that film. The authenticity of the performance shone through the screen, and Jackson was soon able to parlay his rave reviews into parts in movies like Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, and Pulp Fiction.
In the end, even though it led him to his lowest point, Jackson credits The Piano Lesson with helping him turn his life around.
He told IndieWire, “I have a very special place for that play and what it did to me, and the clarity and the change in my life and where it led me.”
