The 1999 scene Samuel L Jackson couldn’t stnad shooting: “The sooner you kill me, the happier I’ll be”
Samuel L Jackson has given moviegoers some genuinely iconic moments over the years. The Ezekiel 25:17 moment from Pulp Fiction featured him delivering great vengeance and furious anger with star-making, wild-eyed gusto.
The “Avengers Initiative” moment from Iron Man made geek hearts pound with excitement, as did Mace Windu’s lightsaber battle with Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode III. There was also his stomach-churning reveal as ‘Mr Glass’ in Unbreakable and Gator’s harrowing last dance in Jungle Fever. Interestingly, though, one of Jackson’s other iconic moments came in a scene that he absolutely hated shooting.
In 1996, Jackson starred in The Long Kiss Goodnight, a cult classic action thriller written by Shane Black and directed by Renny Harlin. It faltered at the box office, but has gained a considerable fanbase over the years, and Jackson himself counts it as his favourite of his own movies to watch. The star had such a good time working with Harlin, in fact, that they made a pact to collaborate as often as they could.
Fast forward a few years, and Harlin was putting together the genuinely insane sci-fi horror movie Deep Blue Sea at Warner Brothers. He had a lot riding on this tale of genetically engineered super sharks because he hadn’t made a hit movie since 1993’s Cliffhanger.
He wanted to stack the deck in his favour by casting Jackson in the film, but there was one problem – there was no role for him in the script. In 2024, Harlin told JoBlo, “I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I don’t have anything for him, this is horrible.’ So, I sat down with the writer, and I said, ‘We have to create a role for Sam.'”
Thankfully, Harlin knew exactly what he had to do: rip off Alien. He explained, “In Alien, Tom Skerritt was the best-known actor in that movie, and he was the captain of the ship, and everybody was like, ‘OK, we’re gonna follow him,’ and the audience was like, ‘Okay, thank God, as long as we have Tom Skerritt, we’re going to be OK.'” Then, to the audience’s shock, Skerritt was killed halfway through the film by the xenomorph, which left them rudderless and needing to put their faith in Sigourney Weaver, a then-unknown actress.
Part of why the scene became so effective is that audiences had been conditioned to trust Jackson’s presence almost immediately. By the late 1990s, he had already established himself as one of Hollywood’s most commanding screen presences, regularly portraying characters who dominated every room they entered.
Deep Blue Sea deliberately weaponised that expectation, encouraging viewers to believe Russell Franklin would emerge as the film’s authoritative hero before abruptly removing him from the story in spectacular fashion.
The moment also helped cement the film’s cult reputation because it perfectly balanced horror, absurdity and dark comedy in a way many studio thrillers rarely dared to attempt at the time.
Harlin may initially have wanted a more serious dramatic payoff, but the sudden interruption of Franklin’s speech transformed the sequence into something far more memorable than a conventional motivational monologue ever could have been. The sheer unpredictability of the death scene ensured audiences would keep talking about it long after the credits rolled, which is often the true mark of a lasting cult movie moment.
Harlin and the writers repeated the Skerritt trick with Jackson wholesale, creating the character of seemingly heroic corporate executive Russell Franklin for him. You see, Franklin was no ordinary stuffed suit. Instead, at a crucial point in the movie, when all hope seems lost, and the sharks are killing folks left, right, and centre in the submerged scientific facility, he reveals that he is a survivor.
He stands in front of a group of scared characters and tells them he was previously caught in an avalanche with six other people, and it took them a week to claw their way out. He may have done some unspeakable things to survive, but that shows that man can triumph over nature. It appears obvious that a hero is rising among the group.
Then, out of nowhere, a shark leaps out of a whirlpool behind Jackson, cutting off his speech midflow and dragging him beneath the waves in its mouth. The shocking moment became the film’s most memorable aspect, and to this day, it still appears on lists of the best movie death scenes. Here’s the thing, though: Jackson utterly hated the speech and practically begged the filmmakers to kill his character before he had the chance to get through it.
You see, in the original script, Jackson’s triumphant speech was seven pages long. According to visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun, though, “It was seven pages of the worst dialogue you’ve ever heard in your life.” When it came time to shoot the scene, Jackson cut out most of it by going straight to the section where Franklin reveals only five of the seven in his group made it out of the avalanche. Harlin told him not to get there so quickly, to which Jackson complained, “Renny, have you read this dialogue? I don’t want to say it.”
Harlin insisted on more takes but couldn’t ever get Jackson to say the whole speech. However, each time he did his shortened version, Jackson made sure to hit his mark on the set, which would help Okun add the CGI shark during post-production.
Eventually, Okun approached Jackson and suggested, “Sam, you know, we can kill you even before you’re at the end of the pool if you’re happy.” By this, he meant that Franklin would get chomped before his speech got into full swing. A relieved Jackson exclaimed, “Yeah, I’m not happy. Just kill me. The sooner you kill me, the happier I’ll be.”
In the end, Harlin took some convincing that this was the right call, as he had his heart set on Deep Blue Sea being a serious horror movie with a speech to match. However, he had to admit he was wrong when he saw how much audiences loved the sheer shock of the scene. Even Jackson was ecstatic, reportedly phoning Okun to say, “Best. Death. Ever.”
