The scene that made Samuel L Jackson mad as hell: “What the hell is going on?”
If there’s one actor in Hollywood that you probably don’t want to upset, because the resultant outburst would be terrifying enough that you’d be left shaking in a corner and apologising profusely, that actor might well be Samuel L Jackson.
He’s been memorably angry in plenty of movies, but immediately your mind goes back to that scene in Pulp Fiction where his character Jules Winnfield asks for a sip of soda and a bite of cheeseburger from a low level hoodlum who is frankly and quite understandably crapping himself as Jackson works himself up into a controlled rage, quotes bible verses and shoots him in the shoulder.
Rarely have movie characters ever been quite so menacing, quite so wild-eyed with measured fury, and Jackson did exactly the same in Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked western some 20 years later. The man has done on-screen anger better than most over a long period of time.
So one can only imagine what it was like for a cast of youngsters filming Coach Carter back in 2005, a film about an ultra-strict high school basketball coach who takes no-nonsense from a failing team full of misfits when he takes over, with Jackson as the very shouty lead.
In an incredibly unwise decision, according to one of the young cast members on the movie, one pool party scene ended up with some of the actors getting somewhat inebriated for real, which did not go down well with Jackson whatsoever. Antwon Tanner, the actor who played ‘Worm’ in the movie, revealed what happened when the legendary perfectionist Jackson turned up ready to film his lines, recalling: “Everybody was drunk. So we wasn’t getting nothing done like we were supposed to. So Sam, when he came to set, shit’s gotta go right now, like it’s supposed to go. But we all faded”.
Adding, “He was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He was mad as hell.”
One can only imagine how pant-soiling that would have been especially given Jackson was in full shaved-head mode for the role, but you can bet there were plenty of ‘Yes sir, sorry sirs’ muttered before filming continued.
Coach Carter was one of those classic American sports dramas that our friends over the pond seem to love, following in the tradition of Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers and 1993’s Rudy starring Sean Astin. It received pretty mixed reviews at the time, but did receive plenty of award nominations, not just for Jackson’s performance, but for the film’s director, Thomas Carter, too.
Jackson has always been an incredibly prolific actor since his breakthrough roles in the late 1980s, and the year he made Coach Carter was no different, as he appeared in four other movies, including the Star Wars prequel Revenge of the Sith, aside from a guest spot in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Extras.
He’s continuing that pace with no fewer than nine different projects currently in different stages of development, including an action thriller about the US president’s armoured car called The Beast, another thriller from former James Bond director Martin Campbell called Just Play Dead opposite Eva Green, and, excitingly, a rumoured role in the latest JJ Abrams movie named The Great Beyond.
Co-starring Glen Powell and Jenna Ortega, it’s a sci-fi that is reportedly about a fantasy book author who reveals that the mystery world he has created is, in fact, real.
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