The secret to his Guinness record, Jackson said when we first met in his cramped third-floor dressing room at the theater, is “longevity.” But there are other reasons, too. He can cross the color line (“Twisted,” “The Red Violin” and “White Sands,” for example, were written for white characters, according to Jackson). Actors and directors like to work with him. “When I yell, ‘Cut!’ Sam becomes Sam,” Harlin told me. “He jokes around, makes a relaxing atmosphere. There’s no weirdness with Sam.” He’s known too for being an actor who’s better than his material.
John Lahr of The New Yorker said “The Mountaintop” was “a mess” but described Jackson as “admirable, compelling.” He invests the bittiest of bit parts with something electric to rivet an audience’s attention. And he’ll work cheaply if the role has some personal meaning for him.
As an only child, he went to movies alone, he said, “to be taken out of my place and transported to another world.” Years later, when people questioned why he appeared in one turkey or another, he would answer, “Because it was a movie I’d seen as a kid.”
One such dud, a remake of “Shaft,” was so horrible that Jackson was said to have refused to recite his lines because they were written by a white man. “Not true,” he said, when I asked about the incident. “I changed his lines so they’d sound like a black man,” he said.
When the author countered that those were the words he had written, according to Jackson, “I said: ‘Yes, and you got paid for them. Now let me make you sound brilliant.’ ” Jackson had to say “the corniest line I ever heard in my life and make it believable,” he told me, and then laughed before delivering it again: “It’s my duty to please that booty.”
Why would he make a movie like that to begin with? “Because I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O’Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier. For the first time, I saw ‘The Negro’ get one over on ‘The Man.’ ” He assumed the dignified voice-over of a biblical narrator: “Once upon a time, there were these Negroes, and these Negroes could do anything they wanted to.” He went on: “But those movies were not what I was aspiring to. I wanted to be in the highest-quality films.”
When quality films weren’t offered to him, he took parts in movies whose characters he had wanted to be as a boy. He is Nick Fury in “The Avengers” because “who wouldn’t want to be a superhero?”