Samuel L. Jackson: talks about his marriage, the Oscar snubs and why he works so hard - Cover Story - Interview

IT wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that the movies Samuel L. Jackson has made could fill an encyclopedia. Sometimes it seems like he's under those hot lights 24/7.

He's in the record books as the actor who is believed to have made the most movies during the 1990s, ranging from Eve's Bayou and Jackie Brown to Star Wars Episode 1-The Phantom Menace and A Time to Kill.

Jackson is Hollywood's biggest chameleon, immersing himself in a wide variety of roles in small-budget "boutique" movies as well as huge blockbusters, always delivering memorable, compelling performances. Not only has he taken on numerous roles not specifically written for Black performers, but he has even gone after parts that had women in mind.

For him, work is work. And he admits quickly during an interview in Beverly Hills that he keeps his agents and managers working overtime, checking out scripts and sometimes even just ideas that have been put down on paper. He reads an average eight scripts or treatments a week.

"I keep them trying to find my next job after my next job, after my next job," he says. "I would like to have two projects waiting while I'm working on one. That would make me comfortable."

In his most recent film, he stars with LL Cool J and Irish heartthrob Colin Farrell in a film version of the television series S.W.A.T. If that one is successful Jackson hopes it could be a franchise that spawns several sequels.

And he's always been comfortable working all the time. That's due to that work ethic he learned as a kid growing up in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"I grew up in a household full of people who went to work all the time," he recalls. "Everybody in the house went to work. Other than two weeks of vacation a year, that was it. Every day somebody was hitting it. I know how to get up and go to work."

His list of film credits amazes even longtime Hollywood veterans. Some have toiled in Tinsel Town for decades, making small films here and there while Jackson, who was in his 30s (he's now 54) when he made his debut in 1981 in Ragtime, has churned out some of the most successful films of the last two decades, including Unbreakable, XXX, Changing Lanes, Jurassic Park, Pulp Fiction and The Negotiator.

It was that magnetic performance as a crack addict in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever that caused filmmakers around the world to take notice. He won a special jury prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 1991 and was awarded the Best Supporting Actor award by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Hollywood honored him with an Academy Award nomination for Pulp Fiction, but he lost to Martin Landau for Ed Wood. "Once I evaluated the competition, I figured I should have won," he says. But he knows that politics and sentiment are also a time-honored tradition in Hollywood.

Jackson points out that he could easily have won an Oscar for the movie closest to his heart, A Time to Kill, which he played a Mississippi father whose young daughter was raped by a White man.

His career is so rich that he realizes now that awards, though nice and flattering, wouldn't really have much impact on the kind of scripts that come his way or the amount of money he commands.

Jackson goes into every film project totally focused and committed to making it realistic and entertaining for the audience, not wondering about industry accolades and awards.

When he did the remake of Shaft, Jackson says he wanted to be "a new kind of hero for a new time but have that same kind of attitude, same kind of bravery, same kind of cool and panache. The only place where they messed up was that I wasn't a sex machine for all the chicks. I said, 'Wait a minute, did somebody miss that part of the song?' I've been listening to that song for a long time and that's what the song says. They never got to that part, but that's another story."

In Hollywood, a town known for harboring tempestuous, scandalous performers, he is firmly in the column of the "good guys." He and La Tanya Richardson, his wife of 23 years, have managed to live their lives without being the fodder for supermarket tabloids. He says the two try to live their lives as positively as possible.

"I'm not a bad guy, I don't think."

There were a few reports that he and Spike Lee butt heads, but Jackson immediately dismissed them. "We had one disagreement that got blown into something else that people took a lot of different ways. It had nothing to do with anything but business," he says. "We went our separate ways about it" The two are still in touch with each other.

The only other time he recalls having gotten negative ink was when he signed a petition against the Iraqi war last winter. "I was anti-war in the 1960s, and I still don't think war solves a lot of things. Young people die. War is fought by young people."

He jokingly says it would be nice if older leaders like President George W. Bush and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could engage in a fight in the middle of a street with the winner getting to "run the show." He quickly points out that once the war began, he was totally in support of American troops going in and getting the job done as quickly as possible.