Samuel L. Jackson has enjoyed one of the most remarkable careers in Hollywood history. You can’t even begin to construct a list of the best Sam Jackson movie moments without touching on some of the biggest franchises ever. Jackson was in Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park. He played Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and was a Jedi master in Star Wars. For real, any list of the 10 best Samuel L. Jackson movies is going to be leaving off multiple stone-cold masterpieces. So when Sam speaks up about the different impacts Die Hard with a Vengeance had on his career versus Pulp Fiction, you have to listen and accept what he says.
The reason this conversation even comes up is because Sam Jackson appeared in both of these movies with Bruce Willis, and released them around the same time: Pulp Fiction in 1994, and the third Die Hard movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance, in 1995. Speaking with Masterclass, Jackson shared stories of Willis – a Die Hard veteran – explaining to the Coming to America co-star that involvement in With a Vengeance was going to change his life. Here, listen to Sam tell it:
Maybe too much time has passed, and people have forgotten what a massive success the Die Hard franchise was, particularly through the first three movies. I wrote a book about Bruce Willis that tries to capture the impact of that series on his career, and the industry, but the way that Samuel L. Jackson sums it up really hammers the point home. Pulp Fiction was a major movie for Jackson. It earned him an Oscar nomination, and turned his monologue structured around Ezekiel 25:17 into a pop-culture lightning strike that none of us were going to forget.
Because as impactful as that movie was, its effects were dwarfed by Die Hard with a Vengeance. As Jackson explained, crowds embraced his cantankerous character, Zeus. They’d shout Die Hard quotes back to him when they saw him in the streets. And, more importantly, the film industry suddenly recognized Jackson as someone who could carry a blockbuster. As he recalled:
Things changed. The way you can negotiate, or the kinds of things that come at you after that are very different. So, that’s the break. Pulp was great. Die Hard was better.
After appearing in Die Hard with a Vengeance, Samuel L. Jackson started ramping up his film credits. He continued doing prestige pictures like Eve’s Bayou. He collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on Jackie Brown. But you’d also find him in bigger-ticket items such as The Long Kiss Goodnight, Sphere, The Negotiator and, in 1999, Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. It makes me wonder if Zeus walked so that Mace Windu could run?
It makes me sad that we won’t get another Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson collaboration, as the former retired in 2022 due to an aphasia diagnosis. But we’ll always have Pulp Fiction, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and a string of excellent M. Night Shyamalan movies including Unbreakable and Glass to remind us of their combustible chemistry together.