The book of Samuel

Samuel L Jackson in The Spirit. Photo / Supplied

From crack addict and alcoholic to the highest-grossing film star of all time, Samuel L Jackson is well aware his story could have had a very different ending. He talks to Sean O'Hagan

Samuel L Jackson is telling me why he doesn't attend AA meetings in Los Angeles.

"It's just too weird," he says. "You hear guys saying stuff like 'I've been hitting the red wine too heavy and I need to stop, but I want to keep smoking reefer and doing cocaine'."

He lets loose that high, mocking laugh that is one of his onscreen trademarks.

"In New York, rehab is for real," he continues, getting into his stride. "You sit next to guys who were IV users, guys who stole shit, guys who sold their bodies. In Los Angeles you're sitting next to a guy who wants to go easy on the fine wine. Man, that's a symptom of something right there."

In person, Jackson is engaging company, self-confident and voluble. He doesn't so much talk as hold forth. In full he can sometimes come across like a character from one of his films - maybe Jules, the fast-talking hitman from

Pulp Fiction

, albeit without the biblical quotations. Sprawled across a hotel armchair in central London, he is never less than utterly at ease, and belongs to that rare breed of celebrity - though he is uncomfortable with that reductive description - who seem to enjoy the interview process. Put simply, he likes to talk about himself.

"For a long time, when I was doing drugs and stuff, nobody knew who I was," he says at one point. "Now I'm sitting here talking to you and people are interested in what I've got to say."

Jackson is trimmer than I expected, and a whole lot younger looking than his 59 years. He has dispensed with the Kangol hat that, worn backwards, became a sartorial signature of sorts for a while back there as his hairline rapidly receded. Now, proudly shorn and looking dapper in a bright-blue sweater and designer jeans, he exudes a degree of self-confidence that, in a less charming man, could be mistaken for arrogance. There is an edge to him, too, though - an almost imperceptible flicker of some darker, nervier energy that pulses just beneath the cool, calm exterior.

"I'm not as angry as I used to be," he once told a reporter. "But I can get in touch with that anger pretty quickly if I feel my space is being invaded or somebody is not treating me with the respect that I think I want."

These days, though, people tend to treat Jackson with respect. He commands a reputed $10 million a movie, and with almost 80 films to his name, was recently named the highest-grossing actor of all time in the Guinness Book of Records, displacing Harrison Ford in the process. When you consider that he was a late starter, crossing over into the mainstream only after

Pulp Fiction

, which was released in 1994 when he was 45, the figures are even more phenomenal.

"I like to work," he says, "and when I'm not working, I like to play golf." He once claimed that he has a clause inserted in every contract allowing him to play regular rounds of golf during breaks in filming.

Since becoming clean and serene in 1991, the year he famously played a crack addict in Spike Lee's

Jungle Fever

, Jackson has been nothing if not prolific. He has starred in a string of big box office hits including

Die Hard: With a Vengeance

,

Shaft

and

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

, where he insisted on having a purple light sabre.

What, one wonders, would Freud have said about that?

There have been countless reasonably good films in which he shone -

Coach Carter

,

A Time to Kill

- and one or two turkeys, too. Better by far are the character roles that he seems to relax into: Ordell Robbie, the affable arms dealer in Tarantino's underrated

Jackie Brown

; Doyle Gipson, the desperate and vengeful insurance man in

Changing Lanes

.

"I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour,' he says.

"Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him. Those are the kinds of characters I empathised with when I was a movie-mad kid."

Jackson stars in two new films that attest to both his range and his willingness to go out on a limb. In Frank Miller's much-anticipated take on

The Spirit

, Will Eisner's legendary comic strip, Jackson plays an evil mastermind known as the Octopus.

"It's a cartoon brought to life,' he says. "The violence is straight out of Bugs Bunny and Wile E Coyote. At one point I hit the Spirit with a 12ft wrench and you can almost see the birds whistling and flying around his head."

In the original comic version, the Octopus was simply a pair of gloved hands. In Miller's version he's a mad scientist on a mission to remake the whole world in his evil image. "I'm looking for the Blood of Heracles, which will make me totally indestructible," elaborates Jackson, gleefully.

"Basically, Frank [Miller] gave me the licence to be as maniacal and larger-than-life as I wanted to be. I mean, who could refuse?"

In the upcoming

Lakeview Terrace

, Jackson plays another kind of maniac - one who operates under the veneer of law and order.

The film is a tense racial drama that never quite lives up to the promise of its audacious premise. Directed by Neil LaBute, the playwright-turned-filmmaker whose peculiar talent is the detailed delineation of misanthropy, it explores the racial insecurities of a middle-class America by making Jackson's troubled cop, Abel Turner, a right-wing, bullying racist who wages a vindictive war of attrition on the mixed-race yuppie couple who move in next door to him.

It is Jackson's darkest role to date, and until the film loses its way in the final half-hour, his most nuanced and powerful. How did he feel playing a racist?

"Well, the first thing is that Abel is more than that," he replies, fixing me with a withering look that suggests I have misread the film's subtext.

"It's not crazy, blatant racism. He's an intensely troubled man who has a set of rules that he lives by and expects everyone else to live by. That's his strength and his weakness. Right off, I knew he had to have a sense of humour so that you can relate to him on some level even though he is a detestable kind of guy. There's a personality in there that can be disarming just with a smile, but then before you know it, he's said or done something that makes you want to go have a shower. He's a tricky individual."

Jackson is old enough to have experienced segregation first hand in the Deep South, though he has said more than once that he was not scarred by it. His grandparents were strict to the point of being authoritarian. "They knew where I was every hour of the day," he told an interviewer, "and I was very afraid of their retribution." They also instilled in him the rigorous work ethic that has made him the actor he is today, telling him constantly that he had to work 10 times harder to survive in a world run by white men.

Acting, you feel, was his salvation, and his escape: "I never wanted to do anything else except give people that feeling of satisfaction I felt as a kid when I watched a great actor in a great picture."

Jackson attended a segregated school in Chattanooga, where he was a model student, playing the French horn in the orchestra.

As a teenager attending the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, though, he seems to have suddenly lost his way, ditching his family's traditional values for the cause of black radicalism.

He was suspended after leading a protest demanding a black studies course. It culminated in a standoff with the local police after several faculty members were taken hostage, including Martin Luther King's father. Jackson was suspended for two years and convicted on a charge of unlawful confinement.

Soon afterwards he befriended Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power leader, and was monitored by the FBI, which informed his mother that he would most likely be killed if he continued to embrace radical black politics.

That onscreen swagger is not all front, then. I ask him if he has any regrets about how he lived his young life.

"Well, I made a few movies I shouldn't have," he deadpans, before cracking up with laughter. "But. You know, so what? As for the other stuff? It was all part of growing up in an extraordinary time. That shit helps you mature if you come through it and I'm here, right? Even the drugs and shit - I came through. I turned myself around."

Jackson's long dalliance with drugs and alcohol began soon after he graduated from Morehouse with a degree in drama. He moved to New York City in 1976 and began working as a relatively successful stage actor.

"I paid my dues," he says, "and that apprenticeship was invaluable to me. From the start of my movie career, I never looked at how Brando did this or Gregory Peck did that. Instead I always looked at what I learned in the theatre. What is the character? What does he do? And if there is not enough information in the script, you create a biography for him. When and where was he born? What did his parents do? On and on, slowly building a character.

"The lessons I learned back then I held on to even in the drug fog I was in for years. And I still ask those questions of every character, whether it be for

Star Wars

or

Shakespeare

."

Joking aside, does he ever feel like having a drink, maybe raising a glass to his own extraordinary success? "Hell yeah, there are days when I feel like that, but I don't do it. I ain't the kind of guy who can have one drink. I never could. That's what I have to remember.

"I never had one drink in my whole life. When I bought a six-pack, I didn't drink a couple of beers and put the rest in the fridge for later in the week. I drank the lot, then went out and bought another one. I was compulsive."

Does he think that, in some way, that compulsion now drives his work? "Yeah, I guess so. I read six to eight scripts a week. I want to get up every day and act. The work defines me now."

One of the most refreshing things about Jackson's fall from grace and his amazing recovery is that he doesn't make a big deal about it. He doesn't even seem that regretful.

"That's true. See, I had a real good time for a long time, then I had a bad patch at the end. And even that got me to where I am now. So what's to regret?"

Before he departs, I ask him as diplomatically as I can if, now that he's hitting 60, he is considering redefining himself once more, maybe easing up on the action pics for roles more suited to his age.

"I hear what you're saying. I'm settling with that," he says, nodding.

"I know what I was thinking when I was sitting watching

Indiana Jones

last year. I love Harrison, and I love watching him do what he does, but at a certain point it just doesn't look great." He grimaces, then breaks into that familiar mischievous grin. "I like to think I have more respect for my audience than that." He pauses, then adds: "And for myself."

LOWDOWN

Who:

Samuel L. Jackson, the biggest box office actor

Born:

1948, Washington, DC

Key roles:

Jungle Fever (1991), Juice (1992), Patriot Games (1992), Jurassic Park (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Jackie Brown (1997), The Negotiator (1998), Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Deep Blue Sea (1999), Rules of Engagement (2000), Shaft (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Changing Lanes (2002), Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002), xXx (2002), Basic (2003), S.W.A.T. (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), The Incredibles (2004), xXx 2 (2005), Coach Carter (2005), Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005), Snakes On a Plane (2006), Black Snake Moan (2006), Jumper (2008)

Latest:

The Spirit opens at cinemas today

- OBSERVER