Sam sizzles as streetwise superguy

10 April 2012

Everyone wants a piece of Samuel L Jackson. Outside the Dorchester, where the first Shaft film in 17 years is being promoted by its makers, a pack of young Jackson fans is accumulating behind a crash barrier.

Why are they here? "We're here, because Sam's the Man." ("They're here," the Man will tell me, "to get my signature and sell it.") Inside, film journalists are being led in and out to meet him. Then, midway through our talk, Toni Collette of Sixth Sense fame, and one of Jackson's leading ladies, tears into the suite demanding he comes out right now and look at something. "Later," he says, and Collette goes "Really?", astonished that a whim of hers should be denied, and for a journalist's sake.

It's probably unfair to compare Jackson, the new John Shaft, to the two other great black American actors of his generation, Laurence Fishburne and Denzel Washington, but I have interviewed all three now and he is by streets the most likeable: relaxed yet focused, highly intelligent but not rubyour-nose-in-it arrogant. As John Shaft, in his flapping leather coat and fork-shaped goatee, he is the epitome of cool - next to him, Richard Roundtree in the 1971 movie looks as stylish as Andy Sipowicz. But playing the expansive interviewee this tiresome afternoon, Jackson, I'd say, is even cooler.

But then he is a brilliant actor. His lean, 6ft 3in body and sculpted features grant him screen charisma - it's hard to believe that he is 51 - and his performances have the compulsive quality great character actors generate through detail. Of his 70-odd film roles, you might pick out the lying, cheating crack-addict Gator in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever in 1991, Jules, the Bible-quoting, superstitious hit man in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction in 1994, or the ruthless arms dealer Ordell in his Jackie Brown three years later. They are big, flashy and unforgettable performances but when I ask after his favourite he mentions the quietly insane school teacher he played in 187, a movie he made three years ago about the terrors of inner-city schooling. "It was such a personal journey to involve an audience in. It's real difficult to be that introspective and still let people in." He can play small too.

He has been nominated but not won an Oscar yet, which aggrieves him, but were the world arranged differently he'd have been awarded an honorary one for the feat of concealing his alcohol addiction and crack-taking from his colleagues and family for 23 years.

"I was working every day, doing what I did, and nobody else knew. All of a sudden, I was kind of tired of it and fed up and it was just time to do something else. But the job never stopped. I mean," he asks in mock exasperation, "how else was I going to pay for my drugs if I didn't have a job? There are people who do drugs and go to work every day and never get tired of doing it. It depends on who you are, whether there is a downside. The downside for me was that I was kind of burned out and tired and miserable. That was the downside."

He started using drugs at college in Atlanta, where he studied oceanography until the lure of acting became irresistible. It was cannabis at first, then, when marijuana was taken off the streets, heroin, a drug whose hallucinatory adventures he enjoyed despite an overdose that took him so near death that he gained an out-of-body, grandstand view of his life being saved. By day he drank beer, by night tequila.

Accounts have differed about why he gave up. Losing the lead in a Broadway play is presented as a wake-up call. He had, it seems, been turning up to auditions red-eyed and smelling of beer. Another story has him, three days before his 41st birthday, being dragged along a station platform with his foot caught in the door of a subway train. ("That," he says now, "had nothing to do with anything else than stupidity.") The truth is that in 1988, his wife, the actress Latanya Richardson, found him slumped over the kitchen table, unconscious, clutching a crack pipe. "That was it. That was when I ended up in rehab. My wife said, 'Enough's enough.'"

Did she really not know until then? "As far as I know she didn't. That's what she told me. A lot of people didn't know."

She must have been furious. "Yes. She got over it. She's still making me pay for that. She's just made me buy a new house."

Was it booze, drugs and women? "They all go together. They all join forces at a certain point."

And which made him most ashamed, I ask, knowing that Jackson refuses to wax sanctimonious about drugs and drink. "I guess the only ashamed moment I had was when I got clean and I'm standing in rehab and Latanya and Zoe [their daughter] are there watching me, and I have to stand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Sam and I'm an addict.' You look at your nine-year-old kid sitting there and go, 'Shit!' That's embarrassing."

For a dozen years his only addiction has been golf (as we talk, attempts are being made to fix a game of golf for him in Madrid, the next stop on the junket). "Golf and work," he justifiably points out, for he has made 50 films since 1988.

Latanya and he met at college and have been married for 20 years. In their early years in New York, as she won work in soap operas, they assumed she would be the more successful. She says she held up her career for Zoe's sake: "But she is always on the cross. She worked all that time really." Latanya may not have guessed her husband's secret but she did perceive a bloodlessness in his acting, an anaemia he concedes may have been connected with his addiction. Chronologically, the story speaks for itself. "When I was doing all of that I was earning $150 a week. I stopped doing it and now I make $8 million a picture."

Jackson defines luck as "the perfect meeting of opportunity and preparation". Spike Lee casting him as Gator in Jungle Fever two weeks after he left rehab was certainly that. Jack-son's performance is a masterclass in the addict's repertoire, from full-on hustler to catatonia victim, his blank eyes rolling deathward. He says he could have played Gator while still taking drugs but would have missed the point. "I'd have played the fact I was using or was used. When I stopped using I understood the effects of what you do to others. So I played the role not as somebody who used but who used other people."

Only two years before he had been sufficiently unknown to be credited in Sea of Love simply as Black Guy. After Jungle Fever, Jackson's career never looked southward, although he subsequently fell out with Lee over his parsimony towards actors. ("There is no star bigger in a Spike Lee film than Spike Lee. They are all Spike Lee joints," he says.) His choice of roles, however, defies logic. After Shaft he has chosen to make a small film in Liverpool, while Latanya, with Zoe now safely in college, makes a TV series in New York.

The secret of their marriage is, he says, keeping apart long enough to miss each other. His own parents were not so well matched. Brought up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he met his father just a couple of times and has no idea what he did "beyond make a lot of babies" with different women. "He wasn't there. He didn't even teach me how to be a man. I had my grandfather and his brothers for my strong male models." An only child, he was raised by his mother, aunt and grandmother, and retreated into private, film-inspired fantasies. The South in the Fifties was, of course, still segregated and Sam went exclusively to black owned and run cinemas.

What did he watch? "The same movies you guys watched! You just had to watch them with your own people. That was how it was, how we lived. I had the same heroes as everybody else. Until Shaft came along I hadn't seen a hero who was like me on screen. When we played games, we pretended to be Roy Rogers, Gene Autry or Errol Flynn, whoever was the guy at the time. The only black movie star was Sidney Poitier and when we saw Sidney he was either a sidekick or a sacrificial lamb of some sort. You didn't want to pretend to be that."

By 1971 and Shaft, the integration battle was being won. Richard Roundtree not only came to dinner with white folk, à la Poitier, he laid them. "It was different, exciting, powerful, inspiring," Jackson recalls. "I couldn't afford the leather coat but I developed that walk and grew my hair and some sideburns. Tried to grow a moustache. All the girls wanted somebody who looked like Shaft."

The original Shaft movie flatlines once Isaac Hayes and his lengthy, heart-pumping title song are done, but its definition of hip lives on. Jackson grew up wanting to be a white hero. Twenty years on, everyone now wants to be a little blacker than they are.

"Hip-hop culture has inundated all parts of society. All my daughter's little friends wear baggy pants and big shirts and say, 'Yo!' White, black, Asian, Spanish, everybody is just part of the hip-hop nation now."

The sequel is a far better made film than the original and topped the box office charts when it was released in the US, proving, alongside the other summer hits, Big Momma's House and Scary Movie, that black films are now commercial mainstream. Commensurately, Jackson, who has periodically complained about his wages, was paid more for it than for any of his previous movies. Its success, however, makes me worry about its hero's values. Shaft's promiscuity has been toned down; his vigilantism and gun-worship have not. At the start of the film, he is a New York police detective and I winced for him when he punched a suspect in the street.

"Yeah, he breaks his nose. He's been callous about this kid dying. It is one of those visceral reaction things."

Except he does it twice. "Well the second time he does it for emphasis!"

He didn't worry about presenting this image of a black cop? "Not at all. Anyway, we fixed that. In the original script he was a cop all the way through. With all the problems they were having with police brutality in New York, all the complaints by minorities, we thought it was important he got off the force."

Because the NYPD is a disgrace right now? "Totally. Besides, in the song it says he's a black private dick. Song says, 'He's a black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks.'"

Yet in this film he takes only one lover? "Yeah. When I saw the script, I thought, 'What part of the song do they not understand?' I guess we just got too busy to deal with that part." So he'd have liked Shaft to have had more chicks? "Sure. I'd do Shaft II if they put some sex in it."

There is, you see, no cant about Jackson, but this is not to say he is an easy man. On set, he argued continuously with Shaft's producer, Scott Rudkin, over Richard Price's script, particularly over the dialogue's grasp on the vernacular. (Rudkin and Price are white.) Jackson reportedly "screamed, ranted and raved".

How fierce do disputes become with him? "It depends. I try not to involve crew members and everyone else in a conflict. I try and keep it as private as possible. I would never go and lock myself in my trailer and not come out to work, but I'm bull-headed enough to know that when the camera's turned on I am the person that's standing there being filmed. I'm going to say what I want to say. So sometimes that's a compromise and sometimes it is an argument." And how many of the arguments did he win? He looks astonished. "All of them."

Jackson once said he took up acting for the wrong reason, to impress girls. So why does he act now? "Because it impresses me," he says. I have to say, Jackson impresses me too.

Outside, the fan club spots me emerge. It is my chance to impress by answering simple questions about their hero. Is he wearing a Kangol cap, they ask. He is, I say. They are awed. Whatever Samuel Leroy Jackson has got, it's catching.

Shaft opens on 15 September.

Sam sizzles as streetwise superguy

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