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*Disney/Marvel’s “Black Panther” may be the third top-grossing title of all time, but Samuel L. Jackson isn’t convinced that the movie is going to have any lasting effect for Blacks in Hollywood, as some critics have suggested.
“I’m not positive that Black Panther is going to change the dynamic of black stories being told in Hollywood and being accepted all over the world,” Jackson recently told Vogue Arabia.
Jackson believes part of the problem lies with the film’s genre.
“It’s an action-adventure story and a lot of people like those, and they’ll work all over the world forever because everybody loves a hero. But not everybody loves a drama about somebody’s life experience – that’s why awards have a separate category for foreign films; they are perceived as being different,” he explained.
“Once we stop perceiving them as different and just see them as good films and they get recognized in the same category, we’ll be laying markers.”
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Jackson, who’s currently starring in a sequel to 2000’s Shaft titled “Son of Shaft,” says the portrayal of black characters on screen is important to him.
“When we started the film, the producers wanted to make an action comedy, and I told them that you can’t make John Shaft a comedic character,” he said.
“He can be funny, but he has to be strong, dynamic, and charismatic in all the ways that he was because he is part of our mythology. Shaft is part of our black film anthology. He was a hero and one of the first people we saw to be that kind of a character,” Jackson added.
Meanwhile, 12 years after starring in the somewhat comical “Snakes on a Plane”, Jackson says he still can’t board a plane without people mentioning “Snakes on a Plan”
“A lot of people disparaged that film, although that’s exactly the kind of film I would have gone to see when I was a kid,” he added. “But people at security always ask, ‘You don’t have any snakes, do you?’ I’ve also had a pilot announce, ‘Everybody can feel safe today, if there are any snakes, Mr. Jackson is with us.’ But it’s all fine. Some actors go through their whole career and nobody really remembers what they did, they just get people coming up to them saying, ‘Oh, you were in that movie’ and snapping their fingers, trying to remember what it was… but nobody forgets Snakes on a Plane!”
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