If you could have any superpower you wanted, what …
"Teleportation," Samuel L. Jackson said. "Take out all the wasted time, and think of what you could do."
That's a thought you'd expect from a busy man, and Jackson is nothing if not that. The new year is shaping up to be a whirlwind for him, featuring roles in some of 2019's most anticipated film openings, including M. Night Shyamalan's Glass, now in cinemas, Captain Marvel on March 8, a reimagined Shaft on June 14 and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5.
That's a daunting lineup for a man who turned 70 in December, but Jackson, clad in a grey T-shirt, dark slacks and a baseball cap with little golf clubs on it, didn't look or act like 70.
"I call him the hardest-working man in Hollywood," Shyamalan said in a separate interview.
Jackson has a filmography that's a mile long -- he didn't want to take a guess, but IMDB gives him 172 film and television credits though 2018 -- and he isn't slowing down.
"There's room for more," Jackson said, sipping water. "I'm not really sure how many movies I've acted in. I think it's a lot, and it's going to be a lot more in the future."
Glass casts Bruce Willis as former security guard David Dunn, the role he introduced in Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000). This time out, Dunn must use his superhuman abilities to track down Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a dangerous man with 24 separate personalities first introduced in Shyamalan's Split (2016). Jackson resumes his Unbreakable role as evil mastermind Elijah Price, aka Mr Glass -- so called because his bones are unnaturally fragile.
That Unbreakable and Split were destined to come together was tipped by a teaser at the end of Split that featured Willis as Dunn.
Jackson relished the chance to return to his Unbreakable role.
"I just loved the complexity of Elijah," he said. "I loved that he has his mom, who understands him and knows who he is. Even better, he knows who he is as a man.
"He's an extremely strong character who has an extremely fragile body," the actor continued. "But his mind is solid, which is the main thing, and he has a belief that this mind is stronger than anything anyone could ever take away from him.
"I just loved resuming this role of a man who is quiet, but you can always see the wheels turning," Jackson said, and then added with a laugh: "I think this also proves something to audiences, which is that I don't just play the same [expletive] all the time. Yes, I like the loud ones, but there's something to be said for playing a quiet one."
It's been almost 20 years since Unbreakable. How have Dunn and Elijah changed?
"We're older," Jackson replied, cagily avoiding plot spoilers. "We've had time to figure out what we do believe -- and what we do not believe.
"What I can say is that it was great to be together again with Bruce and Night," he said, relaxing. "It was a ride with some very intense characters. And it was great being in a room and watching James McAvoy do what he does with those many characters. I watched someone transform in front of my eyes."
Jackson's casting in Unbreakable was entirely the idea of Shyamalan, who was riding high after the unheralded The Sixth Sense (1999), which also starred Willis, became a surprise smash.
"I remember running into Bruce years ago, in a casino in Marrakesh one night," Jackson said. "Bruce said, 'This kid is writing a movie for us'. I'm like, 'What are you talking about?'. Then I said, 'The kid from that movie about the dead people?'. I told him, 'By the way, I read that. I wanted that one'. Bruce said, 'That's the kid'.
"Bruce actually called Night, who said, 'I'm writing your scenes right now'," Jackson recalled. "It has been that random and fortuitous. We stumbled into this place and something really magical happened."
After 20 years, was it tough to get the band back together? Not so much, Shyamalan said.
"I just called these guys and asked them to come back," he said.
"When Night asks you to do something," Jackson said, "you do it".
Much of the film was shot at an abandoned mental hospital after midnight, with Jackson, McAvoy and Willis joined by Sarah Paulson, playing a prison psychiatrist with unorthodox ideas.
"I looked around," Jackson recalled, "and wondered, 'Is this really happening?'. Then I looked around again and thought, 'Creepy'."
It's also cool, as you'd expect from a film starring Willis and Jackson, both exemplars of cool. How do they manage that?
"You don't think about being cool," Jackson said. "That's the secret. I just get up in the morning and do the work."
Born in Washington, DC, Jackson grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his mother worked in a local factory. He was a shy child who stuttered, but found solace watching movies and then re-enacting scenes with his friends in the backyard.
"I loved Westerns -- John Wayne, Audie Murphy and Roy Rogers," Jackson recalled. "You couldn't move me from Have Gun -- Will Travel [1957-1963] or The Rifleman [1958-1963] on TV."
A speech therapist had the idea that acting might help the boy overcome his stuttering, so Jackson got involved first in school plays and then in community theatre.
"There was something about being someone else that made the stuttering stop," he recalled.
He majored in drama at Morehouse College and, after graduation, spent a few years in regional theatres before he made the decision to move to New York, where he auditioned by day and worked as a security guard at night.
His big break was when director Spike Lee cast him in Do The Right Thing (1989). That led to numerous other Lee films, notably Mo' Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991), and also to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), which earned him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. He's subsequently become a regular in Tarantino's films, including Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2004), Django Unchained (2012), Inglourious Basterds (2013) and The Hateful Eight (2015).
Jackson's lengthy filmography also includes A Time To Kill (1996), three Star Wars movies beginning with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Coach Carter (2005), Snakes On A Plane (2006), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017). He first played superspy Nick Fury in Iron Man (2008), and has gone on to play Fury in six additional films -- with at least two more coming -- and two episodes of the television series Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2014), making him the glue of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He also voiced Lucius Best, aka Frozone, in The Incredibles (2004), a role he reprised in Incredibles 2 (2018), which is generating Oscar buzz as a possible best animated film nominee.
"According to my social media, the fans were waiting for this one," Jackson said. "I was pretty much being asked five or six times a week. I knew it would deliver, and it did."
Jackson returns as Fury in Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home. He will also star in Shaft as John Shaft II, son of the original private eye (Richard Roundtree), in a sequel to Shaft (1971), after having played the nephew of the original in Shaft (2000).
"I love doing movies that are entertaining and give people their money's worth," he said.
His fans often greet him by parroting his most iconic lines, which doesn't bother Jackson at all.
"Actors go through their whole careers and no one remembers one line they said," he said. "I have people constantly saying, 'You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in France? Tell 'em, Vincent'."
Then he'll join the fans in quoting Vincent (John Travolta) from Pulp Fiction: "A Royale with Cheese."
Pulp Fiction made Jackson, and he's never forgotten it.
"I auditioned for Quentin for Reservoir Dogs [1992]," Jackson recalled. "I was at Sundance when he screened it for the first time, and I was awed by that movie. I knew this was really different. After the film I walked up to Quentin and said, 'This film is amazing'. Quentin said, 'How did you like the guy who got your part?'.
"A year later," the actor continued, "I got a call saying he wanted to have dinner with me. We talked about movies, and then he told me he was writing 'this thing' and he would send it to me. I was in the backwoods somewhere, filming another movie, and the script arrived in plain brown paper. I sat down, read it and said, 'Oh my God'.
"The first time I saw it, there were tears running from my eyes," Jackson said. "I was so happy and pleased that I was part of something so special."
When he's not working, Jackson usually can be found on a golf course or at home in Beverly Hills, where he lives with his wife, actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Their daughter Zoe is a television producer.
If there is any link between his long gallery of characters, the actor figures it comes down to brains.
"Most of my characters have been the smartest person in the room," Jackson said, "and that's fine with me. I love an intelligent character who uses words well."
