Samuel L. Jackson is 73, but when he starts talking it’s as if he grew up with the Sphinx — and knows its secrets too. Maybe this wisdom effect happens because Jackson has enjoyed more lives than an Egyptian cat, and seen more things that almost anybody alive. He’s seen his name at the top of the list of the biggest earners in Hollywood movie history, and he’s seen his ass passed out from drugs, being shaken to consciousness by his family. Not in that order, of course.
But even in dire straits, Jackson always put his own accent on things and changed the common grammar: he’s been down, but never out. Even in Beverly Hills. His latest project is an Apple TV Plus series called The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, based on the Walter Mosley book (March 11). It’s yet another story in which somehow circumstances just can’t keep Samuel L. Jackson down.
In a recent piece in The Times, Jackson talks everything from Oscars to Joe Rogan (boo) to Martin Scorsese (boo) to Quentin Tarantino (yay), Leo DiCaprio (yay) and, of course, the n-word. But it’s his straight-up take on what the movie business is really about that’s probably most refreshing.
Jackson thinks that money and popularity are “what the business is about.” It follows that they should give an Academy Award to the flick that makes the most lucre, call it Most Popular. Nuff said.
Asked if Spider-Man: No Way Home, which made nearly $2 billion, should get a little golden statue, Jackson replies as if he’d been asked if he wanted a royale with cheese. “They should!” he says. “It did what movies did forever — it got people to a big dark room.” In other words, that same thing at which Samuel L. Jackson has excelled beyond anybody else alive.
