A boomer who never got over it

'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Samuel L. Jackson ('The Hateful Eight')

A tremendous actor, he always seemed to me to be the kind of guy who would make a big deal of his admiration for criminal race-haters and marginal psychopaths like Malcolm X.

At Morehouse College in Atlanta, Jackson led several lives: actor (his favorite classes were in acting and public speaking), activist (he joined the Black Power movement and served as an usher at MLK's funeral), athlete (he was a champion swimmer) and, in his words, "street thug." 

For a while, his activism threatened everything else in his life — in 1969, the FBI warned his mother that if he didn't get out of Atlanta they could not guarantee his safety, so she forced him to relocate to Los Angeles, where he worked as a social worker. 

(It didn't even occur to him to pursue acting at that time — "Theater was more exciting to me and more accessible to me than moviedom," he says.)

. . . .

New York-based Lee, who had seen him in A Soldier's Play and told him he wanted to work together. 

Lee didn't offer Jackson a part in his directorial debut, She's Gotta Have It (1986), but from then on, Jackson says, "Every summer I did a Spike Lee job and the jobs got bigger and bigger." 

Lee hired him for only a day's work on School Daze; then cast him in a colorful supporting part in Do the Right Thing; and then gave him the role of his lifetime, to that point, as Gator, the crack addict, in Jungle Fever. 

Jackson got the offer while "in rehab recovering from my cocaine, alcohol, whatever, everything addiction," which ended up being great preparation.

But it turns out he's not as bad as I thought, though he is, to use his own kind of language, "a dumb-ass."

(And what a potty-mouth!)

From the ads, the movie looked like fun.

He's already made up his mind about his own vote in 2016: "I'm forever a Democrat, you know, and I'm gonna vote for Hillary. 

"I mean, I love Bernie — Bernie's a man of the people — but he can't win. So I gotta cast my vote for a person that can keep those other people from winning, okay? 

"Not to mention, you know, Hillary kinda knows the job, she can hit the ground running. 

"She didn't have a huge learning-curve like Barack [Obama] had or some other people had. 

"And hopefully she can open up the skeletal files of those do-nothing assholes that go to work, like, four times a year and not vote on things [an apparent reference to Sen. Marco Rubio and other elected officials with poor attendance records] and threaten them with whatever she and Bill [Clinton] uncovered on them years ago and make 'em do something and we can get something done."