Samuel L Jackson shares career-changing advice from Bruce Willis
Samuel L Jackson has shared a piece of career advice that Bruce Willis gave him during the filming of their 1995 movie Die Hard With a Vengeance.
The pair shot John McTiernan’s film in 1994, the same year Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was released, in which they both played major roles. Jackson has recently shared a tip Willis shared on set to ensure that he achieved career longevity despite the obvious box-office success he was enjoying that year.
“He told me, ‘Hopefully you’ll be able to find a character that, when you make bad movies and they don’t make any money, you can always go back to this character everybody loves,” Jackson said.
Jackson added: “He said, ‘Arnold’s got Terminator. Sylvester’s got Rocky, Rambo. I’ve got John McClane.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it didn’t occur to me until I got that Nick Fury role—and I had a nine-picture deal to be Nick Fury—that, Oh, I’m doing what Bruce said. I’ve got this character now.”
While Jackson’s cinematic legacy was most probably cemented without his Marvel cameos, his nice-picture work with the franchise reportedly earned him between $2 and $3 million.
Willis and Jackson continued their collaboration on M Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable and its 2019 follow-up Glass. Since then, Willis withdrew from public life in 2022 with his family issuing a statement explaining that it was due to him being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.
Several of his family members took to Instagram yesterday, March 19th, to celebrate the actor’s 70th birthday, with his daughter Scout writing: “Happy birthday to the greatest of all time.”
She continued, “Every day I thank the Gods that 50% of my DNA is from him. The music I make, the magic I create, and the magnetic mischief I incite—that’s my father’s legacy alive in the world.”
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