Samuel L. Jackson is identified with Quentin Tarantino’s movies more than any other actor. To date, he has appeared in five of Tarantino’s films: Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight, half of the director’s entire filmography. (Jackson also narrates Inglorious Basterds if you want to count that too.)
But as simpatico as Jackson and Tarantino are as collaborators, they don’t see eye to eye on everything. As super-spy Nick Fury, Jackson has been one of the cornerstones of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2008’s Iron Man, and Tarantino recently criticized the “Marvel-ization” of Hollywood, and claimed the actors who play their signature superheroes are “not movie stars.”
In an appearance this week on The View (via Entertainment Weekly), Jackson responded to those comments. As he put it:
It takes an actor to be those particular characters, and the sign of movie stardom has always been, what, asses in seats? What are we talking about? That’s not a big controversy for me to know that apparently these actors are movie stars. Chadwick Boseman is Black Panther. You can’t refute that, and he’s a movie star.
Certainly, there are huge stars within the Marvel universe, including the late Chadwick Boseman, Robert Downey Jr., and obviously Samuel L. Jackson himself. There are other actors, though, who might be more famous as Marvel characters. And Tarantino isn’t necessarily wrong that success has not always followed those actors when they’ve attempted to headline movies that don’t involve superheroes. So it’s not a simple or cut and dried issue.
Jackson will next be seen in Marvel’s Secret Invasion series, which is coming in 2023 to Disney+. We’ll have to wait and see if and when he works with Tarantino again, who has said he is currently writing a limited television series that he hopes to shoot in the near future.
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