Samuel L Jackson has said that a deleted scene from 1996’s A Time to Kill would have won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
In the film, a courtroom drama adapted from a book by John Grisham, Jackson plays a man placed on trial after killing two white men who abducted and raped his 10-year-old daughter.
Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey and Matthew McConaughey starred alongside Jackson in the film.
In a new interview with Vulture, Jackson, 74, reflected on the changes that had been made to the film in the editing suite.
He said: “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.
“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***?’”
Jackson went on to claim that some of the scenes that the film’s creators had taken out “kept [him] from getting an Oscar”.
The Pulp Fiction star recalled that onlooking cast and crew members had been brought to tears by his performance in a scene which ultimately did not make it into the feature.
Samuel L Jackson in ‘A Time to Kill'— (Warner Bros)
He continued: “But also the things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar. ‘Really, motherf***ers? You just took that s*** from me?’ 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. I was like, ‘Okay. I’m on the right page.’
“That s*** is not in the movie!” Jackson added. “And I know why it’s not. Because it wasn’t my movie, and they weren’t trying to make me a star. That was one of the first times that I saw that s*** happen. 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.”
Jackson can currently be seen in the Disney+ series Secret Invasion, streaming now.
