A Hollywood ending

Samuel L. Jackson may seem larger than life spouting colorful (and often unprintable) phrases. But before he rose to the top of Hollywood's A-list, he was a no-name actor plagued with addiction problems.

By Steve Pond

Between acting jobs, Jackson enjoys golfing and typically tees off every day at 6 a.m.

Even if they don't see him, other golfers know when Samuel L. Jackson is on the course. It's his language: In a game known for restraint and decorum, the guy walks around the golf course cursing like ... well, like a character in a Sam Jackson movie. "I say it 30, 40 times a day," he says of one particular expletive that's familiar to his fans. "Miss a golf shot, scream at somebody who's cheating ..." And if any of his fellow golfers don't appreciate those early morning blasts of inappropriate verbiage, they tend to take it in good humor. Hey, Sam's come out to play -- what are you gonna do?

He may be a serious (and very good) golfer and a dedicated actor whose movies, including the recent "Star Wars" films and "The Incredibles," have grossed in the neighborhood of $3.8 billion -- making him one of the highest-grossing actors ever -- but in a way, Jackson always will be our favorite bad boy, an avatar of attitude whose air of no-nonsense machismo is leavened with equal parts playfulness and profanity.

"After I talked to him, I said, 'I think you're supposed to be in this movie, man,' " says director Craig Brewer, who cast Jackson in the upcoming Southern Gothic drama "Black Snake Moan" as a small-town farmer drawn back to his blues-playing past through an unlikely encounter with a troubled young woman played by Christina Ricci. "He brought real subtlety and weight to the part," Brewer says, "but at the same time, he gets to be the bad [boy] we all want Sam Jackson to be."

His vocabulary notwithstanding, the man himself isn't entirely sure what to make of that reputation, which dates back to "Pulp Fiction." "The whole 'king of cool' thing kind of cracks me up, because I don't consider myself to be that," says Jackson, 58, clad in light-blue sweats, his long legs stretched onto the coffee table in front of him. "I'm kinda boring most days. I sit at home, I read, I watch television." Married since 1980 with a 24-year-old daughter, he and his wife, LaTanya Richardson, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and now live in an 11,000-square-foot Tudor mansion on a wooded lot in what he has called "a pretty ostentatious part of Beverly Hills." Their neighbors are Denzel Washington and Sumner Redstone.

Musician Carlos Santana, a good friend, thinks the real Sam Jackson is less like the flamboyant hoodlums of his best-known movies and closer to the title character in 2005's "Coach Carter," an inspirational high school basketball coach who demanded his players live up to high academic standards, even if that meant benching his stars. "He's cool and tough and all that, but if you hang out with him, you'll see more of Coach Carter than his other characters," Santana says. "Being around Samuel L. Jackson reminds me of being around guys like Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye, because there's not just one dimension to the guy. I call him a multidimensional warrior."

In "Black Snake Moan," those dimensions include a foray into Santana's own territory: Jackson plays blues guitar in the film, and there's no cutting away to show a stand-in's flying fingers. The Chattanooga-bred actor had never picked up a guitar before, although he had played trumpet and French horn in school and had varied musical tastes. Growing up, he listened to rock 'n' roll and loved soul music; he has been known to do a mean "Me and Mrs. Jones" on karaoke night.

Before filming started on "Moan," director Brewer took Jackson on excursions to meet with some old bluesmen, stirring up a few memories for a man who had spent many summers in Georgia. "Going down into Mississippi and going back into those woods brought a whole bunch of stuff back that I had kind of forgotten," Jackson says. "My grandfather's brothers and some friends of my uncles were moonshiners back in the woods. And when I was younger, I also had friends whose fathers owned clubs and stuff, so I spent some time in jukes.

"There are people," he continues, "who are locally famous, who nobody knows outside of one little area. But when they play, everybody shows up. They were big deals in a 30-mile radius."

The sense that his "Moan" character, Lazarus, was coming from a place Jackson also had been was one reason the actor thinks he won the approval of Brewer, who initially approached Morgan Freeman about the part. But the veteran actor wasn't easy on the young director: If Jackson is a tough guy in real life, it's in his insistence that those around him be as dedicated to their craft as he is to his. "He made us better," says producer Stephanie Allain. "Sam is a consummate pro, and he doesn't suffer fools at all, so we had to be on our 'A game' to keep him happy."

Jackson grew particularly protective of Ricci, who spends much of the movie clad only in cotton underwear and a skimpy top, often as not with a heavy chain around her waist. "There were times when Craig would ask her to do stuff, and I would have to stand up and go, 'No, that's dangerous and sort of exploitative, and you guys need to rethink that,' " Jackson says.

This is not to say that he himself always has been the complete professional. During his first 20 years on stage, on TV and in movies, he says he frequently showed up for work drunk or stoned. "I'm a product of the '60s," he says. "If you didn't use drugs, you were either a cop, a narc or a square." He says this the way he says almost everything: casually, matter-of-factly, as if it's entirely reasonable. The man does not agonize over or apologize for his checkered past; he discusses it calmly and openly, and he refuses to attribute his actions to anything but youthful excess, abetted by a permissive environment. Jackson claims that one of his drama teachers told his students that they would never make it if they weren't able to emulate British thespians such as Richard Burton, who was known for drinking on the job. "We drank all day, we smoked marijuana -- we were artists," he says. "That was just my lifestyle."

But by the time director Spike Lee had offered Jackson his breakthrough role -- a drug addict in 1991's "Jungle Fever" -- the actor's lifestyle was at a crisis point. When he is asked about this period, Jackson's nonchalance fades just slightly; it's one thing to dismiss marijuana as a lifestyle choice, but it's quite another to casually write off a cocaine addiction. "I had crossed the line," he admits. "Smoking cocaine doesn't last very long, and once I got to that point, I was on a down slide. I guess the discovery that I needed help, and accepting it and getting it, was the greatest thing that happened to me." He pauses. "Or my wife discovering me passed out and saying, 'You need to go to rehab.' "

Jackson shrugs. "It was one of those things where I said, 'OK, I've done this other thing long enough, so I'll just try it this way for a while and see what happens.' And I got immediate results. As soon as I stopped getting high and drinking and doing all these other things, then I started doing interviews and having lunch in Hollywood and stuff."

Jackson smiles and shakes his head, surprised all these years later at how long it took him to learn a few basic lessons. "Once I got out of my own way, this was able to happen. And I'm having a lot more fun doing this than I was doing that."

Steve Pond last wrote the holiday movie preview cover story for USA WEEKEND Magazine.
Photograph by Roger Erickson for USA WEEKEND
Hair by Robert Stevenson; makeup by Allan Apone; styling by Samantha McMillen, The Wall Group
Clothing: suit by Paul Smith; shirt by Givenchy; tie by Ellen Christine