Samuel L. Jackson is cursing the editors of one particular film for robbing him of an Oscar.
The actor undoubtedly became a bona fide star during the 1990s, but claimed Thursday he was robbed of an early chance at an Academy Award — when a pivotal scene from Joel Schumacher’s “A Time to Kill” (1996) was left on the cutting room floor.
“The things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar,” Jackson told Vulture. “Really, motherfuckers? You just took that shit from me? My first day working on that film, I did a speech in a room with an actor and the whole fucking set was in tears when I finished.”
“I was like, ‘Okay. I’m on the right page,’” he continued. “That shit 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.”
The legal drama was one of the first to be adapted from the novels of John Grisham, and centers on an ambitious young lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) defending a Black father (Jackson) who murdered a group of white supremacists after they raped his daughter.
Jackson’s infuriated eruption during cross-examination in the film became so famous that it was eventually satirized by Dave Chappelle — and later became a ubiquitous meme on social media. The actor himself, however, was less than pleased by the final product.
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Jackson told Vulture the perception of his character was entirely skewed when a scene, in which he explains to his daughter that he only killed her attackers because she “needs to know that … they will never hurt her again,” was 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,” he told the outlet. “When I saw it, I was sitting there like, What the fuck?’” Jackson continued.
Jackson, who has starred in more than 150 films and television shows, notably received his only Oscar nomination for “Pulp Fiction” (1994) before finally winning an Academy Award of his own in 2022 — under the lifetime achievement category.
Jackson, who told Vulture that the omitted scene from “A Time to Kill” was “bigger than the movie” itself, revealed that its omission “was one of the first times that I saw that shit happen.”
In the end, Jackson certainly isn’t lacking in recognition or success.
The actor, who joined the “Star Wars” franchise and became a pivotal character in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, and ranks among the highest-grossing actors of all time — and holds the Guinness World Record for most films over $100 million at the global box office by an actor.