Samuel L. Jackson says cut A Time to Kill scene would have won him an Oscar: 'Really, motherf---ers?'
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Samuel L. Jackson believes he could've won an Academy Award for his role in a certain 90's thriller — but it's not the one you might expect.
After 150-plus movies and half a century on our screens, the acclaimed actor still hasn't won a competitive Oscar. He did take home an honorary Academy Award in 2021 — but hasn't actually competed since his 1995 nomination for Pulp Fiction. Following his memorable turn as a philosophizing hitman, Jackson initially thought he would generate some Oscar buzz with Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill. But when he saw the finished film, he realized that wouldn't be the case after all.
In a new Vulture profile, Jackson reflected on the many ways that the 1996 courtroom drama changed in the editing suite.
"The things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar," Jackson said. When he saw the final cut, he was shocked about one deleted scene in particular. His reaction? "Really, motherf---ers? You just took that shit from me?"
Christine Loss/Warner Bros/Kobal/Shutterstock Samuel L. Jackson in 'A Time To Kill'
"My first day working on that film, I did a speech in a room with an actor and the whole f---ing set was in tears when I finished," Jackson recalled. "I was like, Okay. I'm on the right page. That s--- 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."
Despite his frustration, Jackson wholly understood the decision and says it was not the last time that he noticed individual moments being cut for the sake of a larger story.
"That was one of the first times that I saw that s--- happen," he said. "There are things that I've done in other movies where I said, 'Wait a minute. Why did you take that moment out of the movie?' Because the moment, in that movie, it's bigger than the movie."
In A Time to Kill, Jackson stars as Carl Lee Hailey, a Mississippi man on trial for killing the two white men who raped his daughter. While he could accept his Oscar-worthy scene being removed, other decisions made for the final edit leave him frustrated to this day.
"When I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her," Jackson said of the heartbroken father. "That's how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out."
He continued, "It looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, What the f---?"
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