How Samuel L. Jackson Became his Own Genre

After “Pulp Fiction” made him “the coolest [expletive] on the planet,” Jackson said, “it was no burden to be cool. I just present myself as I am.” When I asked him if Tarantino was cool, he laughed. “Quentin’s a movie geek. He sucks the air out of a room until Bobby De Niro mumbles something to upstage him. Now that’s cool.” I said that a friend of mine who worked for the Coen brothers told me Jackson was cool mostly to suburban white boys. Jackson shrieked: “Then why don’t those [expletive] white-boy Coen brothers give me a job?”

Jackson went on to talk about people he considers cool. Tommy Lee Jones, because he’s authentic and smart. Scarlett Johansson, because she’s haltingly honest, always struggling to express her thoughts precisely. (“I love Sam Jackson,” Johansson told me. “We’re the Bogart and Bacall for a new age.”) Guys who don’t get ruffled in life-or-death situations, like James Bond, are cool. “Me? I’m not like that,” Jackson said. “I shoot first, then say” — he assumed a shrill, panicky voice and added an expletive — “ ‘It looked like he had a gun!’ ”

Clint Eastwood is “emphatically cool,” because he plays characters whose moral code is outside the mainstream of conventional society. Sometimes it’s cool to laugh at yourself, as John Wayne did when he got old and parodied his younger cowboy self in “True Grit.” Jackson can laugh at himself, too. When I asked him whose idea it was to dye his hair red in the film “The Negotiator,” he said: “Mine. I was feeling Aboriginal!”

When I left the theater after our last visit, it was raining outside, and I had forgotten my umbrella. I went back up to his dressing room. Jackson was still on the sofa, now thumbing his BlackBerry. I said, “Forgot my umbrella, Sam.” He did not look up. “A senior moment,” I said. Nothing. I shrugged and departed a second time, realizing that Jackson cut me out of his consciousness the moment I left him. His “emotional disconnect.” Jackson has an inability, or maybe a refusal, to show emotion easily in his life, which is curious, since he invests so much passion in the characters he plays. Maybe it’s as Travolta told me: Actors like himself and Jackson go see their own movies to see themselves invested onscreen with all those human qualities they fear they don’t possess themselves.