The three TV shows Samuel L Jackson wishes he’d starred in: “My agents made sure I never had time”
One positive aspect about the rise of streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+is that the budgets for making TV shows have increased so much that we have enjoyed a decade’s worth of high-quality small-screen shows, enticing movie stars to make the jump and producing work as good as True Detective, Severance, Mare of Easttown and more, But Samuel L Jackson was quite late to the party.
Jackson is one of the highest-grossing actors in cinema history thanks to his appearing not just in hit films like Tarantino movies Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, plus Jurassic Park and Die Hard With a Vengeance, but also a raft of sci-fi franchises including his pivotal role as the head of Shield in countless Marvel movies and as Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels.
Few actors have a hit list as extensive as Jackson’s, and so it was only going to be a matter of time before a company like Netflix or Apple threw enough money at him to bring him over to television.
Apple won the round in 2022 with a series called The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the story of a man in his 90s with dementia, left to the care of an orphaned teenager, which was very well received, with the show being nominated for several industry awards and Jackson’s performance garnering much acclaim.
That same year, Sylvester Stallone began his lead role in another show, the Taylor Sheridan created Oklahoma mob drama Tulsa King, which Jackson would go on to join in the third season. Now, since his character went down so well with fans of the gritty drama, a spin-off show called NOLA King has been ordered, and Jackson will play the lead role.
But he could have been involved in television far earlier had he not been so entrenched in stage and screen, and he always wished he could appear in some of the first shows that were thought of as cultural shifts toward the binge-watching we’ve all become so accustomed to now, as he told Firstpost.
“I was always interested in doing TV, they just wouldn’t let me. I always thought, as an actor, I should be able to work in whichever medium I want. I should be able to do theatre, television, film, whatever. There was, for a while, the stigma that you could either be a movie star or a soap opera star,” he explained.
He mournfully added, “Way back when there was The Sopranos and The Wire and The Shield, all of these were continual shows or long, long movies. I always wanted to be part of those… But my agents and managers, being the wonderful people they are, made sure I never had the time to do any of that stuff.”
Aside from filming more of Tulsa King and its spin-off, the always prolific Jackson also has a host of upcoming projects in varying states of readiness, from The Beast, an action thriller about the US president’s famously over-armoured car, to another movie with long-time collaborator Ryan Reynolds, a comedy called Futha Mucka, and another thriller called Just Play Dead with Eva Green.
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