SAMUEL L. JACKSON: No snakes for this charmer
Before making Snakes on a Plane, the film about, well, snakes on a plane, Samuel L. Jackson stipulated that he didn’t want the live serpents, some of them poisonous, anywhere near him. Clips from the film show them dropping from overhead luggage lockers and air ducts. Jackson, 57, plays an FBI agent escorting a Mafia member to court but a bad guy wants the Mafia guy dead, hence the snakes.
The movie revels in its shlocky premise. Much of its hype has been generated by internet forums. Before the film’s release, Jackson’s catchphrase — “I want these motherf***ing snakes off this motherf***ing plane!” — already sounds well-used.
And we’re used to his bug eyes: Jackson’s roles are always slightly larger than cinema- screen. In 1994 he marked his career peak as Jules, a Bible-quoting hitman with shiny, frizzy hair, in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Raised by his mother in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jackson studied oceanography at college. He switched to acting and met his future wife LaTanya. “My recipe for a happy marriage? I let her shop all that she wants,” he says. “If we do have some kind of conflict, I stop and think what part I played in it.”
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Jackson is referring to his former alcohol and drug use, which — at different times — embraced marijuana, cocaine, heroin and a bottle of tequila a day. “If you find yourself in a situation where you feel like you gotta wake up every day and you gotta get high, then that’s when it becomes something you have to address,” Jackson has said. But, in a refreshingly honest coda, he added: “I don’t seem to have suffered any long-term problems and I had a ball.”
Jackson got clean in the late Eighties and got his big break in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), as a crack addict. He took the role two weeks after leaving rehab. “I didn’t need any make-up. I was still detoxing.” His subsequent characters zipped between comic and menacing.
“The phone stops ringing for everybody eventually,” he believes, yet in the Nineties he made an average of five movies a year: Jurassic Park, Die Hard With a Vengeance, Shaft and Jackie Brown among them. He also honed a dandyish image, spryly turned out in Kangol cap and tam-o’-shanter.
“Nowadays, he says, “my only drug is golf. I also read a lot of comic books. They’re morals at their purest — good versus evil.” Suddenly his newfound zeal for snakes, those ultimate interlopers in the Garden of Eden, makes perfect sense.