Samuel L Jackson has shared that he doesn’t believe simply being nominated for an award is enough, and it’s an “honour” only to win.
Jackson earned a best supporting actor nomination in 1995 for his role as Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and in 2022 received an Honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
“We’ve been in the business long enough to know that when folks go, ‘It’s just an honour to be nominated.’ No it ain’t. It’s an honour to win,” Jackson said in an interview with the Associated Press, as he sat alongside Michael Potts while doing press for his film The Piano Lesson.
“You get nominated and folks go, ‘Yeah I remember that.’ Or most people forget. Generally it’s a contest you didn’t volunteer to be in. I didn’t go in there so I could flex. ‘Let me do my scene, so you can remember who I was.’”
“They nominate you and people go, ‘What is that movie you’re nominated for? What’s the name of that thing?’ And after it’s over and people have a hard time remembering who even won.”
After decades in Hollywood and growing Oscar buzz for his new film, "The Piano Lesson," Samuel L. Jackson shares his approach to award nominations. pic.twitter.com/oE0ryMRNjt
— AP Entertainment (@APEntertainment) November 26, 2024
Last year, Jackson said that a deleted scene from 1996’s A Time to Kill would have won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
“In A Time to Kill, 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. That’s how I played that character throughout,” he told Vulture.
“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. And 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***?’”
At the Tony awards in June last year, Jackson was nominated in the best actor category for his role in the play The Piano Lesson, and went viral for his reaction when he lost to Brandon Uranowitz.
It recalled the moment in 1995 when he lost best supporting actor at the Oscars to Ed Wood actor Martin Landau, and could be seen saying “s***” as Landau’s name was announced.
The Piano Lesson is streaming on Netflix.
