“I do it thoughtlessly”: How does Samuel L Jackson managed to steal every single scene?
I had a couple of thoughts the other day while rewatching Jurassic Park for what must be possibly the 700th time, one of which was that the dinosaurs still look impressively scary more than 30 years after it was released, and the other being that Samuel L Jackson absolutely makes the entire movie.
His performance as the chain-smoking, permanently concerned chief engineer of the ill-fated theme park is a masterpiece in delivering bad news again and again; Steven Spielberg uses him as a device to repeatedly inform us that yes, our fears are indeed coming to fruition, and yes, the computerised lock on the velociraptor enclosure has indeed failed.
Much as it’s tempting to say it was an ‘early’ example of Jackson being able to steal scenes again and again, because he’s been doing it ever since on his way to becoming one of the top three highest grossing actors in history, he’d already been going for well over two decades by that point, moving from low budget TV roles, to theatre appearances in New York to being introduced to a young Spike Lee who was preparing to make films like Do The Right Thing in 1989.
And once he’d landed Jurassic Park, he was of course about to become a genuine icon thanks to his Academy Award-nominated role as Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino’s seminal masterpiece Pulp Fiction the very next year, his gun-toting, Bible-quoting hitman making its way onto bedroom walls around the world and probably becoming the most famous part of Tarantino’s game-changing movie.
Part of what made his work so memorable on that film was his double act with John Travolta, and he showed it was no accident by forming another one the next year with Bruce Willis in the superb third Die Hard movie as a long-suffering shop owner getting dragged around New York City trying to defuse Jeremy Irons’ explosive devices.
Ever since, for three decades, Jackson has usually stood out whenever he’s appeared in a film, probably most notably in Tarantino’s films like The Hateful Eight and Django Unchained, but also in big-budget blockbusters like the Star Wars prequels at the turn of the century and with his uber-cool cameos as the Director of SHIELD in the Avengers movies.
As for just how he managed to become such a scene stealer, Jackson told NPR: “I guess it’s just something that kind of exists in me. I guess through my theatre training, I’ve learned how to take dominant positions and submissive positions, when that’s necessary, through body language or through just positioning of oneself inside the framework of a scene. And I kind of do it thoughtlessly now. If I’m the dominant person, I just take a dominant position and try to make myself as large as I possibly can.”
Adding: “When it’s time for me not to be there and just kind of be in the background or just be around, I try and find a way to make myself almost invisible. It’s not something that I think about.”
Jackson, who has always been pretty prolific, will now have the chance to do plenty more movie stealing with as many as nine different projects in the works, including a movie about the US President’s armoured limo called The Beast from director Renny Harlin, who was in charge of Jackson’s brilliant and much overlooked thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight back in 1996.
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