Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson is an actor, born 1948.
Samuel Leroy Jackson was thirty-one before he made his professional theatre debut, in Mother Courage and Her Children at the Public Theater in 1980, and he spent most of that decade on stage rather than on screen. He originated Private Louis Henderson in A Soldier's Play off-Broadway, then Boy Willie in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987, returning to that play in a 2022 Broadway revival in a different part. Film came in small doses first: Coming to America in 1988, Goodfellas in 1990, then a run of early-nineties work including True Romance, Menace II Society and Jurassic Park, where he plays the park engineer watching his own systems fail.
What separates him is rhythm. Jackson does not deliver a line so much as time it, holding a sentence one beat past comfortable so the room has to lean in. Jules Winnfield's diner speech in Pulp Fiction works because he treats scripture as a weapon he has not yet decided whether to use. The same instrument turns cold in Django Unchained, where his house slave's loyalty to his owner is more frightening than anything else in the film, and turns patient in The Hateful Eight, where a very long story gets told in a very small room.
He then became load-bearing infrastructure for two franchises at once, Nick Fury for Marvel and Mace Windu for Star Wars, which is how the films he has appeared in came to gross more than $27 billion worldwide. The Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 2022 for precisely that reach. His other honours include a supporting-actor BAFTA and a Cannes acting prize.
Movies (168)
- The Avengers (2012)
- Pulp Fiction (1994)
- xXx (2002)
- Iron Man 2 (2010)
- xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)
- Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
- Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
- The Incredibles (2004)
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2011)
- Django Unchained (2012)
- The Garfield Movie (2024)
- Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
- Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
- Captain Marvel (2019)
- Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
- Incredibles 2 (2018)
- The Hateful Eight (2015)
- Kong: Skull Island (2017)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
- Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
- Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
- True Romance (1993)
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
- The Marvels (2023)
- Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)
- Jumper (2008)
- Afterburn (2025)
- The Legend of Tarzan (2016)
- Oldboy (2013)
TV (21)
- The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005)
- The View (1997)
- What If...? (2021)
- The Boondocks (2005)
- Marvel Studios Legends (2021)
- The Oscars (1953)
- Extras (2005)
- Secret Invasion (2023)
- Ghostwriter (1992)
- Afro Samurai (2007)
- Staged (2020)
- Some Good News (2020)
- The American Revolution (2025)
- Amend: The Fight for America (2021)
- The War (2007)
- The Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA (1995)
- Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist (2024)
- Iconoclasts (2005)
- The Henry Rollins Show (2006)
- The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2022)
- Prohibition (2011)
Where to start with Samuel L. Jackson
Start with Pulp Fiction, not because it is the famous one but because it is the cleanest demonstration of what he does to a sentence. Then Jackie Brown, where he plays a gun dealer whose charm is a delivery system for menace, and which may be the best film anyone involved made that decade.
For range, A Time to Kill gives him raw grief instead of command, and Coach Carter is a formula sports picture he simply refuses to play at formula temperature. Unbreakable uses his stillness rather than his volume, which almost nobody else thought to try. If you have three hours, The Hateful Eight is the longest he has ever been allowed to hold a floor. The Nick Fury work in The Avengers is the paycheque, and he is good in it, but nobody should begin there.
The Tarantino collaborations, where he gets the best writing
Four films with a director who writes to his rhythm, and it shows. Jules in Pulp Fiction is the complete performance. Jackie Brown gives him something colder and nastier, Django lets him play the most uncomfortable role of his career, and The Hateful Eight hands him a whole room to control.
Nick Fury, and the franchise glue nobody else could play
A part that is mostly walking into the last thirty seconds of a film and making it feel enormous. The first Iron Man cameo essentially invented the modern post-credits scene, Winter Soldier finally gives Fury an actual film to be in, and Captain Marvel plays the whole thing for comedy.
Jackson before Pulp Fiction made him a name
He was nearly forty and had been working for years, and some of the early parts are the most interesting things on his shelf. Jurassic Park is a small role everyone forgets is him, Die Hard with a Vengeance is him carrying an action film as the reluctant civilian, and Unbreakable is the strangest.