Samuel L. Jackson is today one of the most well-known Hollywood stars in the world. But it wasn’t always like that. Today, he explains what advice his co-star Bruce Willis gave him when they appeared together in Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1994. Advice that he only understood much later, as he says.
What advice did Bruce Willis give him: Samuel L. Jackson has now revealed to Vanity Fair what advice he received from Bruce Willis, who celebrated his 70th birthday on March 19, 2025:
He said to me: Hopefully, you’ll find a role that you can return to when you’ve made bad movies that haven’t made you any money. And then you can always return to that character that everyone loves.
He said: Arnold has the Terminator, Sylvester has Rocky and Rambo. And I have John McClane.
Bruce Willis had his big breakthrough with the character John McClane. 7 action stars turned down the lead role back then:
Jackson only understood much later what Bruce Willis meant by the advice
What this advice meant for Samuel L. Jackson: Jackson tells Vanity Fair today: Back then, he didn’t think much of it and just said “Oh, okay”.
But what Bruce Willis meant became clear to Samuel L. Jackson only when he got the role of Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and closed a deal for 9 movies.
That’s when he realized: “Oh, I’m doing now what Bruce told me. I have this character now.”
Has Samuel L. Jackson made bad movies? It’s a matter of taste whether a movie is bad or not. But Samuel L. Jackson had some movies in the 90s and later that received at least low ratings on IMDB.
In any case, Samuel L. Jackson is not exactly known for being particularly selective in his choice of roles. In the comedy Ted, there is a legendary gag that plays on this:
Just before Pulp Fiction (8.9 IMDB) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (7.6 IMDB), Jackson appeared in “Julius Caesar Superstar”, which has an extraordinarily poor rating of 3.2 on IMDB. Even later films like “xXx 2 – The Next Level” (4.5 IMDB) or The Spirit (4.7 IMDB) were not big successes in the eyes of IMDB users.
Although The Spirit certainly has some aspects that speak for it: In a forgotten film that is new on Netflix, you can see 2 Marvel stars in Nazi uniforms that you would never expect
