Samuel L. Jackson is speaking out about another missed opportunity he had at winning an Oscar for one of his early films.
Last year, the 74-year-old actor told The Times that he thinks he should have won the 1995 Academy Award for best supporting actor for “Pulp Fiction” instead of Martin Landau (“Ed Wood”).
Jackson believes he was robbed of a second chance at taking home a golden statuette just a few years later for his role in Joel Schumacher’s 1996 legal drama “A Time to Kill”, which also starred Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock. In the Joel Schumacher-directed film, adapted from John Grisham’s novel of the same name, Jackson portrayed a man on trial for killing the two men who raped his daughter.
In a new interview with Vulture, the actor explains how his cut scenes from the film ultimately affected his onscreen performance.
“In ‘A Time to Kill’, when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her,” he explained. “That’s how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, ‘What the f**k?’”
Jackson believes the editing room dramatically altered his performance to the point where it robbed his shot at an Oscar nomination.
“The things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar. Really, motherf**kers? You just took that sh*t from me?” Jackson told the outlet. “My first day working on that film, I did a speech in a room with an actor and the whole f**king set was in tears when I finished. I was like, ‘Okay. I’m on the right page.’ That sh*t is not in the movie! And I know why it’s not. Because it wasn’t my movie, and they weren’t trying to make me a star.
“That was one of the first times that I saw that sh*t happen,” Jackson noted. “There are things that I’ve done in other movies where I said, ‘Wait a minute. Why did you take that moment out of the movie?’ Because the moment, in that movie, it’s bigger than the movie.”
Despite Jackson receiving an honorary Oscar at the 2022 awards ceremony for his career, he’s only been nominated for the prestigious award that one time, back in 1995.
