Jackson's friends in the North

10 April 2012

He's a cool customer, is Samuel L Jackson. There's the hat, for example. Who else could make the Kangol fashionable?

Jackson's patronage - he wears one throughout Jackie Brown, backwards of course - has elevated this former favourite of Sunday drivers and caravan owners to must-have style accessory.

Today, I am not disappointed. Atop the black leather sits the rakishly jaunty hat. Surely they're paying him a fortune, I say, à la Beckham and Adidas? Surprisingly not: "I'm going to their website launch tonight," he laughs, "so maybe I'll strike a deal with them."

An imposing six-foot-something, with burning eyes, Jackson is one of Hollywood's most prolific and popular actors, famous most of all for his depiction of menacing and homicidal characters - none more evident than Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, who righteously recited Ezekiel 25:17 before dispatching his victims in a hail of bullets.

He's involved with some unsavoury types again in The 51st State, the hotly anticipated gangster caper set in Liverpool, opening here at the end of the week. If nothing else, the film will be celebrated for the fact that, as errant drug dealer Elmo McElroy, Jackson spends the whole picture in a kilt.

"You know it kind of felt good, such a heavy piece of clothing," he explains, sprawling himself on a couch in the Dorchester Hotel, crossing his trainers on the coffee table. "The friction of the whole thing really keeps you warm." But not quite warm enough; Jackson was not always allowed to go underwearless like a native Caledonian. Though he does one "bottom-out" scene, the film's insurance company forced him to wear pants on cold days in case he caught a chill.

Still, the swirl of pleats was to his liking. Locharron (kilt purveyor to the Queen, Frank Bruno and the Dalai Lama, apparently) has knocked one up for his personal use. "They found a tartan that's in my grandparents' surname, Montgomery," says Jackson. Expect a run on them (wearing backwards optional).

Jackson is no stranger to Britain. He's spent plenty of time here working on the new Star Wars cycle, the next instalment of which - Star Wars 2: Attack Of The Clones - arrives in 2002. He's back shooting a few extra bits while promoting The 51st State. Plus, as a golf nut, he was recently over to play in the Dunhill Links Pro-Am at St Andrews.

It's an appropriate quirk, then, that Elmo McElroy is armed with a quiver of clubs, wielding them like Samurai swords as he breaks a few Scouse heads. (A little too enthusiastically - he clonked actor Ray Nicholas four-square on the head, and put him in casualty. "Full on, three wood," winces Jackson.)

So what prompted Jackson, a man who's just splashed out $8.9 million on a Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to Roseanne Barr, to spend the whole of last winter toiling on a relatively low-budget film on Merseyside - notwithstanding the delights of performing alongside Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Ricky Tomlinson and the bloke who played Sinbad in Brookside?

"I work because I love my job," he says. "I can't sit at home and do one movie a year and continue to be as sharp. Plus I've always been intrigued by British gangster films - The Long Good Friday, The Krays. I always wanted to work in this country actually and do a British film."

He's not the first American fish-out-of-water in a British crime movie. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Harvey Keitel have frolicked here before, although perhaps none faced such a difficult assignment: tackling the thick Scouse accent, and negotiating the legendary Liverpudlian "sense of humour".

"Everybody told me the same thing, that it was a very depressing place," he says. "By the time I got there, my expectations were so low that everything was cool. The people were fun."

Jackson admits to being a convert to The Royle Family ("my arse," he titters, mimicking new chum Tomlinson). Unfortunately, Liverpool's principal pleasure - football - was a bit lost on him. In the one Anfield match he witnessed, a European tie, no one explained that the Reds were 2-0 up from the away leg and needed only a draw. ("These guys kept kicking the ball out of bounds. I was, 'What's going on here?'").

But the Scousers clutched him to their bosoms none the less, and the local rags filled columns with reported Jackson sightings - boozing it up at hip nightspot Cream and in dubious bowling alleys. "I don't drink," he corrects. "But I was in the clubs, dancing and hanging out. There's a good party life there. The rave scene's incredible."

The 51st State is about a dancedrug called POS-51; hence the film's ambiguous title. Narcotics have played their part in Jackson's personal life, too. As a child of the Sixties (Samuel Leroy Jackson, student agitator, was kicked out of his Atlanta college for locking the board of trustees in a building for two days, in protest at the lack of black members), his acting career was disrupted by a lifestyle that began to spiral seriously out of control.

He cleaned himself up for his breakthrough role in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991), however, and proceeded to make up for lost time. The sprightly 52-year-old has made more than 80 films, as diverse as A Time To Kill, The Red Violin, Jurassic Park and Unbreakable - most of which don't feature him as cinema's chief badass.

"But I like bad guys," he adds. "Bad guys are a lot more colourful. You get to do all the things that you did when you were a kid - beat people up, shoot guns." Star Wars fans take note. After shuffling on briefly as a Jedi knight in The Phantom Menace, in this second instalment he assures me he gets to kick some serious cosmic ass. "I get to do a lot of things with my light sabre," he enthuses, "a lot of good kendo stuff."

?The 51st State is released on Friday.

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