The role Samuel L Jackson wants to be remembered for: “One movie I wanted people to look at”
Based on his status as the highest-grossing actor in cinema history, an awful lot of people have seen at least one Samuel L Jackson movie. With so many high-profile franchise roles under his belt, it inevitably stands to reason that a large percentage of those people have seen at least a handful.
Whether it’s his recurring role as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s cycloptic exposition machine Nick Fury, his contributions to Star Wars as the Jedi master Mace Windu, instructing the unfortunate test subjects of Jurassic Park to hold onto their butts, fighting a building-sized ape in Kong: Skull Island, or demanding to know the location of his super suit in The Incredibles, Jackson has been in some number of hits.
That doesn’t even include his recurring collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, his two profitable turns opposite Bruce Willis in M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and Glass, hamming it up as a Kingsman villain, sparring with John McClane in Die Hard with a Vengeance, or his early work alongside Spike Lee.
Jackson has been in ten movies that earned more than a billion dollars at the box office and 30 that hauled in at least $250 million in ticket sales. There’s barely a cinemagoer on the planet who hasn’t seen him on the big screen at least once, and then there are the die-hard fans who’ve tracked down and watched his regular forays into straight-to-video territory.
The actor has amassed over 200 credits across film, television, stage work, video games, and documentary appearances, but if he were to vanish off the face of the planet tomorrow, there’s only one picture he’d want everyone to see to get the best experience of what he brought to the industry.
“If there was one movie I wanted people to look at,” he mused to Playboy. “It would be A Time to Kill.” A left-field choice, considering the string of iconic characters he’s played in equally iconic movies, but the role of Carl Lee Hailey in Joel Schumacher’s John Grisham adaptation would be Jackson’s pick for the epitome of everything he does best.
It’s an especially curious selection when the star has been open in admitting the performance he gave on set wasn’t necessarily reflected in the finished film after some alterations were made to his arc and narrative journey that left Jackson convinced he would have won an Oscar had the riveting legal thriller been released with his turn left intact.
Still, if anyone desperately needs a Samuel L Jackson fix and can’t settle on which one of his voluminous credits to watch dating from the 1970s to the present day, then take it from the man himself and either check out or revisit A Time to Kill.
